Derya Gür Underwater, Kaş, Turkey
Derya Gür works every summer as a member of the Bougainville Dive Team aboard the BT Dive Boat. She is a CMAS 3 star Divemaster and a PADI Rescue diver. She is also a local Kaş school teacher at the Anatolian High School in Gökseki.
Photos of Derya can also be found on her Facebook Photo Album.
Derya was born and raised in Kaş and is a certified “local” in every sense of the word. Derya has one sister, her father was a teacher of history at the Kaş high school and her mother retired from the Kaş birth and residence records office (Nüfus Müdürlüğü). It seems that her father was an inspiration to Derya because after attending school in Kaş she went to Uludağ University in Bursa and graduated with a diploma in teaching Turkish literature. After she graduated from the university she was an instructor at a dershani in Bursa. This fall term of 2011, is her first year as a teacher in Kaş her home town.
(A dershane, for those of you who may not know is a “private school offering specialized courses.” Most dershanes in Turkey offer courses in how to take high school or university entrance exams.)
Even though Derya is only 25 years old she has seen a lot of changes in Kaş. For example, when she was a child, the area where the belediye has an auto park was a football field! She also remembers that the harbour only had a stone area and that it was not concrete. The sea wall at the harbour was much shorter also. The current location of Hideaway Cafe was an open-air cinema and there was a prison (cezaevi) very near to where Migros is today.
She said she remembers the hills immediately behind the town center having nearly no villas or apartments covering them as they do now. She said when it rained the electricity was certain to be out for several hours or even longer. There was no air conditioning that she can remember and phones were not common.
Derya started diving because of curiosity. She watched divers as she was growing up and always thought it would be interesting to experience a scuba dive. She finally got the chance when she went to Uludar University and joined their dive club. She first took a Discover Dive with them and shortly after started training in an Open Water Course. She said that she always tells prospective divers that she had a lot of trouble learning how to clear her mask but that she wanted to learn so badly that she persisted and today is an accomplished divemaster. Derya earned her 1st CMAS star while she was in the dive club in Bursa. Later, when she returned to Kaş, she became an Advanced CMAS diver at Bougainville Diving. While earning her ratings, she worked summers as a “slave” on the BT boat, doing all the things that the other instructors told her to do to help out. She believes this experience has made her a better diver.
Derya has been a very successful Bougainville diver and we wish her many more seasons of greeting customers and friends on the Bougainville Dive Boat.
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