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. Five 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 — what a coral is first, then the reef's structure, then its life, then the water all of it sits in, and finally the record that holds the four together.
CoralWatch Coral Health Chart — what a coral is, and how pale it has become. By CoralWatch, The University of Queensland.
Reef Cartographer — acoustic and optical reef mapping.
Reef Demographer — a visual census of reef life.
Reef Hydrocaster — the water a reef sits in.
Reef Chronicler — the record a stranger can still read.
Also taught, outside the pathway: Diver's Gambit — chess at twelve meters.
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.