Anglais de la plongée : pratique en Live avec Wall Street English France et Aquadomia !

Anglais de la plongée. 

Wall Street English France s'est associé à Aquadomia pour proposer des ateliers de pratique de l'anglais de la plongée sous-marine. Ils ont pour but de vous faire travailler votre vocabulaire de la plongée, et de vous faciliter la vie à l'étranger ou quand vous rencontrez des plongeurs angophones.

Conducted by Thomas, an English teacher at Wall Street English in Aix-en-Provence and Vincent, the creator and co-owner of Aquadomia, a scuba diving center and school. Aquadomia was created 15 years ago, I have been diving for 30 years and what we offer is beginners and accelerated training - personal training, one-to-one and small group training in Marseille and the Calanques national park, and also in the Caribbean in Martinique each February.

The first part - when you want to dive, you often search on the internet.

Second step - when you find your dive center, they will ask you some questions.

Third step - visiting the dive center and how it works.

The fourth step – discovering the equipment. Tonights class will concern beginners so if you don't dive it also works. More informations concerning training for beginners here : Open Water training in Marseille.

The fifth step : let's go diving !

The first part, contacting a dive center.

If we’re experienced divers and looking to do wreck dives or deep dives or we are just beginners looking to to do a little scuba diving during our holidays or we are looking to get certified…. all of this depends on what kind of experience we're looking for. So we search for dive centers - scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus). A popular option is a dedicated dive resort– a large hotel complex that is going to integrate scuba diving into the resort. If we're doing two dives a day we can live at the resort and essentially do everything there, paying in one go. Another popular option in is a live-aboard-where we can actually stay on a boat - a large boat or a large sailing ship that goes from dive site to dive site. If we’re looking just to integrate some diving into our holidays then we're just looking at a dive center that that will give us certification possibilities. If we want to go to Hawaii, Australia, Thailand or Mexico, all of these places are going to be excellent scuba diving destinations and our English is going to come in very handy for us. If you have never dived before, you might be interested in a certification program, for example, PADI - the initial certification is called “Open Water”, it's the first level and a good place to start. Or it could be that maybe we want to just do our first dives - maybe we just want to scuba dive without going through the entire certification process, so we want to ask “do you accommodate beginners”; “do you offer a certification program”; “how long does it take?” and “what kind of dives do you offer?” We can say that we “would like to discover scuba diving” or “to do an initiation dive”, “to do our fist dive.”

The second part, arriving at the dive center

Okay so now i am at the dive center, and often the first thing that happens is we are asked if we have a dive card. Do we have a certification or are we looking to to become certified? What do we want, what what are our objectives? So, we need to to say, for example, I would like to be certified or that I'm interested in scuba diving. We can ask, “what kind of dives do you offer?” If we are asked, “do you have a dive card” and if we are experienced or if we are certified divers then there are follow-up questions that we often hear is, “how often do you dive?” “How many times have you gone scuba diving?” “When was your last dive?” Because all of this gives the information to the dive master about our level because it's very important that we have a dive that corresponds to our level. if we are a beginner scuba diver, we don't want to take on too much. When arriving at a dive center, I have always been asked for my dive card – simply, “do you have your dive card? Are you certified?” In my last dives this summer the center kept my card for the days that I was diving and they they gave it back to me when my dives were completed. We can also talk about a log book - a book where if we are experienced divers, we will write down our dives so we can show our experience. Medical Conditions: this is very important because we know that scuba diving is something that can put some pressure on our bodies and so there is going to be the initial question, “do you have any medical conditions that we need to know about?” and this could be our ears, our sinuses, our heart or some other kind of medical problem that could arise. So, you will be asked to complete a medical form before we dive. In France, a lot of dive centers ask for a medical certificate–a physician's certificate of good health. For international diving, we are normally just asked to complete a form. This is important of course; we don't want to have any accidents. It's important to be honest because if you have an infection in your ears or your sinuses, maybe it's not the best time to go scuba diving.

Part three, visiting a dive center.

It’s important to look at everything when evaluating a dive center–is the equipment well maintained? Will the dive correspond to my level? What's the difference between diving and snorkeling? Snorkeling is when we have our mask and our snorkel and we don't have any scuba tanks. Snorkeling is staying at the surface and free diving is going down to the depths. Snorkeling is for everyone and in most health conditions. For scuba diving, you need equipment and you need training. Is it clean and sanitory? Do they have showers and can we safely leave our belongings?

Part four: discovering the equipment

We need a mask, a snorkel, fins on our feet for propulsion and a tank. On the tank, there is a regulator which controls the pressure. We also have a buoyancy compensator device or a stabilizing jacket / vest We use gloves for our hands, especially if the water is cold and for our heads, we can use a hood to cover our head. As we go deeper, there is something called a thermocline, which is where there is a large difference between the water temperatures as we dive. We also use a neoprene suit, with a zipper on the front or the back

Part five : let's go diving !

There are two ways to enter the water–a giant step, where you take a very large step to enter the water from a standing position or we just fall backwards into the water when we are sitting on the side of the boat (obviously you cannot do this from every boat). Beginners are usually more comfortable entering the water using a ladder. We dive with a “buddy” and we communicate constantly that everything is okay and that we are feeling great. When we are diving, we need to balance the pressure in our ears by pinching our nose, and this pushes the pressure into the ear canals to equalize–we do this frequently, maybe every 20 centimetres as we dive down. If you are not an experienced diver, you need to watch your dive master constantly to stay at the same level as them. During the dive, you will learn to check the pressure gauge and learn to balance your lungs by knowning how much to inhale, as when you inhale you have a tendency to rise in in the water and then when you exhale, you go deeper into the water, so you need to manage this by taking small breaths.

The next webinar will take place on 14th December