About Go Pro Caribbean

Will Welbourn is a PADI Platinum Course Director and the founder of Go Pro Caribbean. Approaching two decades training new PADI Instructors from Roatán.

• Roatán since 2003Twenty-three years operating from the same dive shop
• 500+ instructorsPADI Open Water Scuba Instructors certified to date

PADI Course Directors are the only PADI professionals authorised to train new instructors — roughly 800 globally. The Platinum tier is awarded each year to the small group of those Course Directors whose programmes meet the highest performance benchmarks: candidate volume, certification quality and Instructor Examination pass rates. The designation isn't permanent; it's re-earned annually. Will has held the Platinum tier the majority of those years — and Gold for the couple of years when training volume was deliberately lower, during a stretch focused on family and travel. That's the metric working as intended.

One credential rarely visible from outside the dive industry: in January 2005, Will was one of the five founding directors of the Roatán Marine Park — alongside Jennifer Keck, Gaynor Pook, Michele Akel and Alvin Jackson. What began as a grass-roots effort by dive operators and local businesses concerned about reef degradation in the Sandy Bay–West End Marine Reserve has, over two decades, become an internationally recognised NGO. The reserve it now stewards is the same stretch of reef Coconut Tree Divers' house wall sits inside.

The teaching approach has a less-obvious source. Before the diving career came audit work at Ernst & Young in London — and the part that transferred wasn't business acumen, it was the practical skill of building rapport quickly with resistant audit clients, under pressure, with people who weren't initially inclined to be helpful. That same skill is now at the centre of how a nervous IDC candidate gets through their first instructor presentation.

Go Pro Caribbean and Will personally are based at Coconut Tree Divers in West End, Roatán — the four-decade-old PADI 5-Star dive shop covered in detail on its own page. The Roatán Tec Team, led by technical instructor Monty Graham, is co-located there. For the professional training tracks themselves — the Divemaster internship and the PADI Instructor Course — the routes are at the foot of the page.

Travel was the foundation of my life before it was the foundation of my career. As the son of an airline pilot, I was crossing oceans early. The instinct to keep going never settled.

Since 2003 Roatán has been the base — operating home, return point between trips, and the reason I fell back in love with the tropics every time I came home. It's also the place where two of the more important things about a career in dive instruction become true: the work runs in seasonal rhythms that leave real time for travel, and over twenty-three years it builds a network. Candidates I taught in 2008 still show up when we're crossing their part of the world. Some have become the people we stay with on the trip.

Travel is a family affair now. My daughter's upbringing has been a masterclass in motion — South Africa at two, Peru at three, camping under the stars in Botswana, surfing the Atlantic breaks of Morocco. She's logged over two hundred flights before her eleventh birthday and developed a discerning taste for airport lounges (Madrid and Johannesburg currently holding her top spots).

The world doesn't get smaller from the inside of a dive shop. It gets bigger.