A Bit About Me

Aziz Khan "Sinbad" 

What causes people to seek their solace in the deep? For me it was a search for underwater footage. As a TV journalist and a documentary film-maker, I wanted to take cameras where they would normally not go and that is why I became a diver. Ocean had many stories to tell and I was going to be the one to tell them. I soon realized that the ocean does not tell its stories to just anyone. Wrecks at the bottom of the ocean do not rest where we want them to rest so in order to be a story teller, I had to be prepared to dive cold, dive dark and dive deep in limited vis. Thus I became a technical diver. My TV productions have gone on air in many parts of the world and I also won the U.S. Government’s Gold Medal for my documentary series “Into the Depths of History.”

 

I became an instructor because I wanted to teach diving the way I would have wanted it to be taught when I was doing my open water course. An instructor is not there just to show you what needs to be done as a youtube video can do that! He or she is there to allow you to be amazed at your own self and all my courses are designed with that philosophy in mind. “Jeez … I never knew I could do that!” is what they will make you say … if our fins ever cross.

My teaching philosophy

Relax and breathe ...

If there are two words that describe my teaching philosophy then those are "relax" and "breathe." There are two types of people who go beneath the surface. The "underwater tourist," and the "diver." One is a stranger to the medium while the other is a product of the medium. Training someone to experience the underwater world is easy but to train them to be a diver is a different matter. It will require spending a lot of practice hours under the water with your instructor, doing repetitions after repetitions until you are no longer an outsider or a "tourist" down there.

I keep my classes small so that each person could do more practice under my direct supervision. In the end, I only measure my success based on how much improvement my students shows.