Free & open · PADI Master Instructor · Blacksburg, Virginia
Turn a dive into data somebody can use.
Map a reef's structure. Count what lives on it. Profile the water it sits in. Four hours of real instruction, every calculator and every recording slate — free, no account, nothing about you recorded. Certification needs an instructor. The learning does not.
Take only measurements. Leave only bubbles.
Eco diving
Every dive is a potential data point. Almost none of them become one.
Millions of recreational dives happen every year — trained eyes, a depth gauge, a computer log, an hour over a reef. Nearly all of it surfaces as a story at the fill station and nothing more. The reef was observed; it was never measured. The difference isn't effort — it's protocol. Give a diver a repeatable method and a way to tell real change from noise, and the same hour of bottom time becomes something science can use.
Free & open
Nobody needs permission to learn how a reef is measured.
Every lesson, every calculator and every recording slate is here in full — no account, no cost, nothing about you recorded. Read it because you're taking the course, because you're curious, or because you want to run the method yourself on a reef nobody has surveyed.
To be plain about what is and isn't free: the material on this site costs nothing — the lessons, the calculators, the slates, all of it, with no account. The certifications are not free. Taking a specialty means instruction, in-water time, and PADI's certification fee, arranged through a dive center in the ordinary way. Learning the method and earning the card are separate things, and only the first one is on the house.
Specialties
Five specialties. One pathway. A reef you can measure.
A chain of PADI Distinctive Specialties, each building on the last — control first, then structure, then life, then the water all of it sits in, and finally the record that holds all four.
Diver's Gambit — chess at twelve meters.
Reef Cartographer — acoustic and optical reef mapping.
Reef Demographer — a visual census of reef life.
Reef Hydrocaster — the water a reef sits in. Submitted to PADI, pending approval.
Reef Chronicler — the record a stranger can still read. Under development.
Schedule
Learn to dive — with me.
The reef science above is free to anyone. The certifications behind it are taught in person: I teach year-round through Diving Enterprises in Salem — confined-water skills in the shop pool, open water at Gray Quarry. These are the classes I'm teaching myself; the dates drop off the page once they've passed.
Contact
Got the card? Let's talk diving.
Questions about a course, a date, or whether it's a fit — or you've worked through the lessons and want to do it properly in water.