Learn To Scuba Dive on your terms. at your schedule and in your budget.

Completely Private. Completely Performance-Based.

At UB Diving, you are not placed into a large class and expected to keep up with a preset timetable.

Your training is private and your progress is based on performance. Your instructor introduces each skill, gives you the opportunity to practice it, and you move forward only after you have demonstrated mastery.

Some students move quickly. Others need more time with a particular skill. Neither approach is a problem. The goal is not to finish everybody at the same time. The goal is to make sure each student can actually do what the certification says they can do.

Train With The Local Dive Shop That Actually Lives This

UB Diving was built by Sean and Shellie Smyrichinsky and has been serving Vancouver Island divers since 1999. This is not a warm-water certification factory and it is not a parking-lot dive operation.

UB Diving is a family-run British Columbia cold-water diving business with real experience in scuba instruction, dive charters, commercial diving, equipment service, gas fills, technical diving support, underwater inspections, seafloor cleanup work and expedition diving.

Sky Smyrichinsky grew up inside the business and is part of the next generation of UB Diving. Students are not simply arriving for a certification card. They are entering an active local diving community with ongoing training, equipment support, charters and real opportunities to keep diving after the course is finished.

Your Training Schedule Belongs To You

There is no requirement to cram the course into a single weekend.

Your first confined-water session starts the course clock. Under PADI standards and UB Diving policy, the entire course must be completed within one year of that first pool session.

Within that period, your training schedule can be built around your availability, your instructor's availability and your own pace of learning.

Every Open Water Student Trains In A Dry Suit

Dry suit training is not an optional upgrade at UB Diving. It is part of the way we teach Open Water from the beginning.

We do not use wetsuits for student training.

There is a very simple reason for that: people urinate in wetsuits. No matter how thoroughly a rental wetsuit has been cleaned, we are not comfortable asking another client to put it on afterward.

That cleanliness standard also happens to make sense for British Columbia diving. Our students learn in the exposure protection they are actually going to use here.

From the beginning, students learn dry suit buoyancy, weighting, inflation and exhaust control, hose management, emergency procedures and the practical habits required to dive comfortably in local cold-water conditions.

Your Training Equipment Is Included

You do not need to purchase a complete scuba system before learning to dive.

UB Diving provides the required scuba equipment and cylinders during your course so you can learn how the equipment works before deciding what you eventually want to own.

Learn To Dive In The Environment You Will Actually Dive

UB Diving trains students for British Columbia diving from the beginning.

Vancouver Island diving involves cold water, exposure protection, changing visibility, current awareness, buoyancy discipline, proper equipment configuration and good buddy procedures.

Those are not advanced concepts that suddenly become important after you receive a certification card. They are part of becoming a capable local diver.

Students develop dry suit competency, equipment familiarity, situational awareness, buoyancy control and confidence in real ocean conditions as part of their initial training.

The objective is not to finish the course as quickly as possible.

The objective is to produce a diver who is actually ready to go diving.

Certification Is The Beginning

Vancouver Island offers one of the most interesting cold-water diving environments anywhere, and completing your Open Water training gives you the foundation to begin exploring it.

The Giant Pacific Octopus featured above was photographed by renowned underwater photographer Maxwell Hohn, whose work documenting British Columbia's cold-water marine ecosystems has been featured internationally.

Where Can Your Certification Take You?

Your PADI Open Water Diver certification is the beginning, not the end of your training.

Because UB Diving students begin in dry suits and train in real British Columbia conditions, you leave the course with a foundation that can be carried directly into local recreational diving, boat charters, wreck diving and continuing education.

From there, you can continue building experience through Advanced Open Water, Nitrox, Rescue Diver, Divemaster, underwater photography, technical diving, rebreathers and expedition diving throughout Vancouver Island and beyond.

Before You Start