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

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Diving Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.