About Go Pro Caribbean

Will Welbourn is the founder of Go Pro Caribbean and a PADI Platinum Course Director — the rarest level of the credential, held by a small cohort of CDs worldwide. The award is re-earned each year on performance metrics, and Will has held it for approaching two decades. He's been based in West End, Roatán since 2003.

In that time he's certified more than 500 PADI instructors. Within the area, he's the longest-serving Course Director, and he's run more Instructor Development Courses than anyone else.

That depth of experience shapes how the IDC works here. Will's teaching isn't curriculum-by-numbers — it draws on twenty-plus years of running cohorts, examining candidates, and watching how new instructors do (or don't) succeed in their first working seasons. PADI standards expertise comes from having taught and examined them since the early 2000s.

Before Roatán, Will was a Chartered Accountant at Ernst & Young, working on audit teams. He was the one chosen to speak with the difficult clients — the ones who weren't keen to give up the information the team needed. What worked then is what works now in instructor training: the ability to make a real personal connection, quickly, with the person in front of you. That's the centre of how Will runs the IDC — understanding what each candidate is stuck on, and finding the way through. The move from professional services into dive instruction came in 2003, and the people skills carried straight across.

Twenty-three years on the island has built the rest: Coconut Tree Divers as the daily operating home, the Roatán Tec Team as in-house technical-diving expertise, and a network across West End that took two decades to develop.

Considering training with us? Read more about the IDC programme or the Divemaster internship.