As many ‘dive professionals’, diving was never my first choice of career … but it grew on me and it stuck!

After having had a successful start in PR I soon found out this wasn’t the life for me, and I needed to start living. I ended up taking a short vacation to Turkey, a country I’ve had heard a lot about but had never visited. The country and it’s people captivated me and after that vacation I quit my work, sold my house and moved out to Turkey to start ‘living’.

Scuba Diving was intended to be an extra tool to ‘live’ while traveling around the world, however when opportunity crosses your path you have to take it and this is how I ended up for extended time at the Aegean coast of Turkey and decided to remain in that region. It took a while before I actually took the jump and became a scuba instructor; I was far more interested in the business of diving, but after meeting a young man with slight autism that all changed again!

Meeting him and seeing him go through the motions of introduction diving made me think that there must be other ways to approach this, but before I could go and do that I’d really have to be an instructor. When working full time in the dive industry, you quickly figure out that ‘instructor’ means absolutely nothing, but your personal skills and bag of experiences makes all the difference. As every wine is not the same, so are us instructors. You have to pick your flavor right 😉 So being more of a coach with a specific touch for people with disabilities became the focus for me, and that it what I am still successfully doing until this day.