Jolly Roger Diving

Jolly Roger Diving is the #1 SSI dive center in Panama and as such we strive to provide top quality services to our customers. We achieve this by providing excellent SSI dive training, exciting dive locations, and equipment that is maintained better than industry standards. We believe that having regular inspections and shorter service intervals ensures that issues caused by equipment are kept to the absolute minimum.

Our CEO, Vince Wanamaker, had a dream to retire from corporate life in the USA and spend his time diving so in 2016 he started on his journey here in Panama when he found a beautiful ocean front property on the Caribbean coast of Panama. In 2017 Vince shipped a 20' container loaded with equipment to build a dive center from the ground up. After two years of construction the dive center opened in April 2019.

As a technical diver with a high regard to safety, Vince focused on having a high-quality dive center which would be within the top 1% of dive centers worldwide. Starting with our redundant Nuvair compressors that were custom built for our hot humid tropical climate there was no detail left out. All air lines are constructed of 316 Stainless Steel which provide longer life in the tropical ocean environment. With 5,000cf storage banks for Air and Nitrox we are able to fill tanks in a fraction of the time than filling directly from the compressors. Additionally, with the storage banks we now can choose when to run the compressors, avoiding days when we have less than optimal air quality.

As a Mares dealer and service center we regularly inspect and service all our equipment following industry and manufacturers standards. If you ever have a question about any equipment, please ask to see our service logs as we make these publicly available for viewing. We believe a more informed diver is a safer diver. Your safety as a diver relies on us ensuring that our equipment is in perfect operational order, performing within industry and manufacturers specifications.

While diving with us you may see one of our staff attach a red zip-tie to a particular piece of equipment. Don't be alarmed this is simply a method for us to quickly identify that this particular piece of equipment needs to be looked at more closely when we return. In most cases this is due to an O-ring that is letting out "baby bubbles" from the tank. If we believe the issue could lead to a safety issue, we will end the dive, remove the equipment from service and have it inspected / repaired back at the dive center.

We follow all industry standards (at a minimum) for all our equipment inspections and servicing. Here is a list of what the industry standards are compared to our service policies.