Advance Your Scuba Diving Skills

St. Croix is known in the scuba community for the amazing diving to be found here. Divers travel from all over the world to dive The Wall, Cane Bay, Salt River Canyon and the Frederiksted Pier. In addition to offering some well recognized dive sites, St. Croix offers warm Caribbean water, great visibility, and an abundance of diverse marine life. The combination of great dive conditions, coupled with the variety of PADI professional dive shops on the island, make St. Croix a great location for divers to advance their skills.

If you come to St. Croix as a recreational Open Water Diver, you will have a wonderful dive experience. But, while you are here in paradise, why not take the opportunity to advance your dive skills as well? If you are a relatively new diver, consider earning your Advance Open Water certification. Advance Open Water is a great way to build your diving confidence and expand your scuba skills through different kinds of ‘Adventure Dives’ such as deep diving, underwater navigation, night diving, buoyancy control, fish identification, wreck diving, photography, and more. If you want to stay down longer and get back in the water sooner on repetitive dives, earn your Enriched Air Diver certification since enriched air nitrox gives you more no decompression time.

Photographer diving The Wall off Cane Bay

St. Croix offers a variety of dive experiences, so you may want to earn some PADI Specialty certifications that will enrich your underwater experience on St. Croix. The Frederiksted Pier is a world renowned night dive, so that would be a great location to earn your Night Diver specialty. Butler Bay houses five different wrecks, both shallow and deep, as well as remnants of the old NOAA HydroLab. The three shallow wrecks are a great location to earn a Wreck Diver specialty. If you have always imagined taking pictures of the amazing sea life you encounter on your dives, The Wall and Frederiksted Pier offer amazing photo ops making them perfect to earn a Digital Underwater Photographer specialty.

Green sea turtle at night (Photo by: Nep2une Scuba Diving)

For some advanced divers, St. Croix is an ideal setting to work on more professional level certifications. Tech Diving is popular here on the island due to the depth of the Puerto Rico Trench and The Wall it creates. Many of the local dive shops also offer Divemaster and Instructor certifications, so if you are considering a possible career in scuba St. Croix is a great place to get started.

Instructor Development Course at Sweet Bottom Dive Center

Scuba diving opens up a whole new world of adventures and opportunities. In fact, Scuba Diving magazine’s readers named the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Top 5 for Places in the Caribbean and Atlantic for: Best Dive Destination, Wall Diving, Underwater Photography, Beginner Diving and more. If you are going to advance your dive skills, St. Croix offers friendly and professional dive shops that will help you earn your new certification while having a once in a lifetime dive experience. You can even start your learning and classroom work online before coming to St. Croix, so you can spend more time in the water! Visit the links below to find the right dive shop for you, and to learn more about diving on St. Croix. See you down there!

– Jennie Ogden, Editor