|
Geronimo - CMAS
 Zagreb, Croatia 10000, Croatia (Local Name: Hrvatska)
|
DC „Geronimo“ is a non-profit institution gathering people who love diving and dive sports. It was established by citizens on 6th September 2004 in Zagreb. Although the Club appears to be rather young at first glance, its tradition is much longer because the members of the former Dive Sport Club Zagreb, who represented the core of DC Geronimo back then and who established it in 1993, managed the Club till the end of 2002.
Due to sincere love to dive and socialize and not to simply make some profit, diving became more and more recognized by a whole range of active divers who were unsatisfied with a huge number of „private“ dive clubs, whose number tends to increase every day.
The reason why quite a lot of fine dive clubs closed down lies in poor and insufficient progress in dive categories as a consequence of somewhat peculiar approach by some instructors who actually prevented other club members to progress in order not to „threaten“ the status of instructors. However, as soon as such instructors became less and less involved in dive activities due to their everyday obligations, their clubs eventually closed down.
Therefore, in order not to experience the same situation as stated above, our Club fosters progress and improvement of every individual club member from the very start. Thanks to this approach, we have today 9 active diving instructors and as much as 30 dive leaders – a proof that our Club has been continuously active and that it doesn’t depend on available time of 1 or 2 most active diving instructors.
The scope of work in our Club is very broad and it includes diver training courses, recreational diving, and free diver courses for disabled persons, organization of diving trips and camps, underwater sports training, organization of multi-sport competitions, organization and active participation in ecological activities etc.
Diver courses are carried out throughout the year and in accordance with CMAS standards covering all dive categories. Diving instructors train divers for all levels of their CMAS qualification, from the introductory course to more advanced qualifications including dive leaders and diving instructors. CMAS, the first international dive school in the world was established long time ago in 1959 by legendary J.Y. Cousteau who is famous for his researches of the underwater world. The difference between CMAS and other dive schools is that CMAS is a non-profit organization gathering all national diving associations around the world and it is considered as umbrella organization for diver training organizations in the world, in comparison to dive schools, whose number tends to increase every day, in Croatia as well.
Apart from CMAS School, our divers are also educated in accordance with standards developed by other schools which are more specialized for other areas. For example, we organize dive courses for technical diving according to PSS standards and dive courses for children according to Scuba Rangers Standard which closely relies on SSI education system.
So far, we have educated more than 700 divers who attended various dive courses. We are proud to emphasize that one of our Club diving instructors educated the biggest number of divers than any other instructor in Croatia and therefore, the Croatian Diving Association declared him the diving instructor of the year 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007, whereas he won the second place in 2004. Additionally, Croatian Diving Association acknowledged our Club for having educated the biggest number of divers in Croatia.