ever worked on a cruise ship?

[russthedude]

has anyone ever worked on a cruise ship as DM ro OWSI? A friend of mine worked on cruise ships a few years ago (retail) and he said the dive crew had the best jobs on the boat. sun bathing/having fun while at sea, then take [assengers diving when the boat parks up. he said they didn't get fantastic pay, but they did really well with tips. Do cruise ships run open water courses for their passengers? would be ideal to do pool stuff and theory between ports, then jump in the sea when you arrive. just something i've been day dreaming about today...

[johnkendall]

has anyone ever worked on a cruise ship as DM ro OWSI? A friend of mine worked on cruise ships a few years ago (retail) and he said the dive crew had the best jobs on the boat. sun bathing/having fun while at sea, then take [assengers diving when the boat parks up. he said they didn't get fantastic pay, but they did really well with tips. Do cruise ships run open water courses for their passengers? would be ideal to do pool stuff and theory between ports, then jump in the sea when you arrive. just something i've been day dreaming about today...

I've worked on a cruise ship, but not as part of the dive team. Basically what you will be doing is Discover Scuba courses back to back, every day, for months at a time. You won't have any chance to do any of your own fun diving.

For me, working in the evenings/night on the ship meant I could leave the ship during the days and go diving. Worked out much more fun.

HTH

John

[Dive_Monkey]

The first time I ever tried Scuba diving was off the back of a Cruise ship in 1986. It was the Fred Olsen ship "Black prince". A very unique ship at the time as the stern opened up and dropped a floating mini harbour onto the sea. From here you could do all sorts of water sports.

The instructor's name was Dirk Molanar, mostly it was try dives he was doing, a bit theory and pool time and then a RIB out to a beach and dive from there.

He did however take out expierenced divers to wrecks and different sites every time we docked somewhere.

He always looked like he was enjoying himself and it was due to him I got into Scuba diving and have dived ever since! Cheers Dirk, you've cost me a fortune!

[Last Man Standing]

Yes, I learned to dive while I was working on cruise ships. Didn't work as a dive instructor though.
The dive instructor's job was a bit repetitive, DSDs and a few open water courses. They didn't get too much time to dive for fun, although they did manage it from time to time. Probably the smartest thing they did was to run extra open water courses for crew members and then form a crew dive club onboard so that when they did get time to dive for run, there were plenty of people who wanted to get involved. We were lucky on a lot of ships as the Captains often let us use the rescue boat (RIB) for diving. A lot of the dive instructors did a couple of seasons and then moved onto jobs in the shore excursions office onboard.

[laura c]

Not personally, but I work in Grand Cayman and we have a lot of business from cruise ships. AFAIK Royal Caribbean are the only cruiseline in the region that employ on-board instructors now - I think all of the others send their passengers to dive centres on the island for trips. Royal Caribbean do OW pool & theory on board, and their instructors bring their students on island to complete their OW dives - they come to us sometimes to rent tanks and do shore dives from the front of our dive centre. They probably do pool DSDs on board ship as well. Before I came out here I spoke to an agency about working on a cruise ship and was told that they only employ instructors with 2+ years experience..hope that helps even if it's not exactly first-hand info!