Rotorua diving school thrives through tikanga Māori approach

After diving in exotic locations all over the world, Renee Tapsell of Te Arawa returned home with a vision to give back to her people by teaching them water and diving safety.

With her partner Adrian, she opened Aotearoa Dive in September last year and it's already become an award-winning business.

“We've been in the industry for a long time, I'm going on 10 years, he's going on 30 years. So we've moved around the world a lot working as dive instructors, mostly managers for other people's companies. And now full circle we wanted to have something to call our own and run it the way that we want to. So, with all of that experience, we opened up Aotearoa Dive.”

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Tapsell grew up in Maketu, so she was always close to the ocean.

Decades down the line and she is the owner of a thriving business, one that revolves around her biggest passion in life - the Moana.

"It was always a place of therapy for me," she says.

Aotearoa Dive, located in Rotorua, is a certified diamond training centre, providing training in free diving, recreational scuba, technical diving and professional level training. Its store sells all the equipment needed for their courses, along with a service centre to service the equipment, from regulated PCs to tanks.

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Tapsell says rangatahi are her main focus, which has led to internships where youth can receive full diving qualifications.

They also have a relationship with Rotorua Lakes Trust to professionally train marae kai divers.

"That's probably our vision, trying to get a lot of youth involved in the sport to really see if they can make a career out of it," she says.

Source / Whāriki

Aotearoa Dive has won an environmental award, the performance of the year and an excellence award for 2021 from Scuba Schools International but Tapsell says they're not done yet.

"We still have a lot more bigger goals and we want to achieve a lot more than what we've set the bar to and it's certainly in sight."

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