Article Author:

Captain D.J.
Master Instructor

Hi gang,

We had the honor of hosting Karin Suter-Erath from Basel, Switzerland on our dive trip this afternoon. We are of course honored to have all of our divers, but Karin is a special diver. Karin is a Paraplegic. She does not have the use of her legs, but that doesn’t stop her from diving! The more we learned about her, the more we found out that not much stops her! That would include the current we had today. I’ll tell you what, I had fins and working legs and the current was a bit of a challenge to deal with. She just swam right through it with only her hands with no help from anyone. I was impressed to be sure! Karin works at a rehabilitation clinic in Switzerland and teaches patients to play basketball and Tennis. Not only that, she competed for team Switzerland in the Paralympic games in Bejing, China in the Tennis category. She is Open Water certified, and had been on 16 dives before we met her.

Jeff Martin is one of our Instructors and like quite a few us us at Rainbow Reef he is also a certified HSA Instructor (Handicapped Scuba Association)and Dive Buddy. Jeff was her dive buddy for the afternoon and along with Karin they had a great dives! We did a drift dive at French Reef and Jardin who just completed the IDC portion of the Internship and became a PADI OWSI on Sunday was kind enough to carry the drift flag for us. We had a wonderful time with Karin, she is such a nice woman and we are very happy to get to know her a little bit. We hope to see her again soon!

Join us for a few minutes to meet Karin and see our dive with her this afternoon. CLICK HERE to Dive with Karin

Article Author:

Captain D.J.
Master Instructor

Hi all,

It’s been a busy fall so far, and sorry we haven’t had to much time to post to the blog, but we will try to get to that a little more regularly!

Rainbow Reef would like to congratulate Chuck Lewis, for his 1000th dive! Chuck and his dive buddie Mellie are frequent divers with us. They visit us every summer for dozens of dives, and Chuck hit a very important milestone this past October. Wow! Sure some people have more, but if you think about it, for most non professional recreational divers, that is a big number!

Chuck not being one for making a big deal out of such things, Mellie asked us to help her set up a surprise party for him on the boat, to be unveiled after surfacing from the dive. Everyone was in on it, Gabrielle, Zack, Joey, Jesus and the rest of the crew! I think we got him, and he was very surprised!

One of the things Chuck enjoys doing is taking his video camera on dives, his 1000th dive was no different. Normally I end up putting together all the videos on this blog, but this one was produced by Chuck himself, to commemorate the occasion!

So CLICK HERE to Dive with Chuck on Dive 1000!!