Paula is the first female and the first maori certified Disabed Scuba Diver in New Zealand. Paula contacted me via Parafed, enquiring about the disabled diving courses available. She is an incomplete paraplegic, contracted a virus about 5 years ago and as a result her immune system attacked her spinal cord, from being absolutely symptom free, she became paralysed within couple of hours.

She does show a very good progress and improvement, now she's able to stand on one leg and walk with croutches. Due to her sickness, she's in lot's of pain, her spine is crushing her spinal cord due to gravity.

After meeting her, we arranged the medical and hit the pool for a try dive. As usual, there was lot's of rolling around, trying to find balance, placing the weights on different locations, eventually she managed to stay underwater and stop the rolling - all these on her first dive. We progressed well, completed 7 pool dives with skill training before we headed out to the "open lake". Logistically it was again a bit challanging, as there was lot's of equipment to haul around and we had to agree on entry and exit points, but we made it in the lake, swam to our dive location and descended 8 meters below the sunny Auckland surface. Paula was so comfortable that we went straight for a treasure hunt, swam over 100 meters following a "cave" line, until we found the burried "Lake Pupuke treasure" at 12 meters. We completed 8 dives in open water conditions, some with excellent vis and some with very poor, however we made friends with some local fish, they pretty much came to great us on our every dive. Paula said: "diving is liberating", as she has no pain while underwater. She's relaxed, has an amazingly streamlined bouyancy and wants to be underwater as much as possible. She completed her course and I am looking forward to our dive trip to Sail Rock this coming weekend.

Thank You

Warm regards,

Sly