Sunday, 30 October 2016

PADI Advanced Open Water- The what, why and how?

padi logo, blue world, red diver

As a follow on from our PADI Open Water blog earlier this month, I thought it would be appropriate PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course.
to continue with the Advanced Open Water training, particularly since September sees the launch of the new, revised



What is the PADI Advanced Open Water Course?

Essentially, the Advanced course is a continuation of a diver's entry level training. While you have learned the basics in the Open Water Course, the Advanced is designed to build on your experience and increase your confidence and competence in the water.

This course works by building on core issues such as buoyancy and navigation and allowing you to increase your diving certification depth to 30m under a supervised, controlled setting.

You have the opportunity to try different areas of Scuba Diving to see what aspects interest you and if you would like to advance in those areas by making 5 Adventure Dives, which correlate with the 1st dive of the associated Specialty training course.

The core, mandatory dives are the Deep Dive (taking you to a maximum of 30m) and the Underwater Navigation dive. The other 3 you can choose for yourself and there are now, lots more available to choose from.

What's New then?
diver takes photographs underwater as part of training in cyprus

Although the structure of the course is still the same, everything has finally come into the modern age with new manuals, online theory available and updated content.

As an example, where divers who wanted to make the Underwater Photography dive had to read all
about F-stops and shutter speeds, much of that information is just not relevant to the modern digital point and shoot cameras because the camera itself takes care of that.

The new Photography Adventure dive is called Digital Underwater Imaging and is, not only based on photography but underwater video, since most modern cameras offer both.

Other Adventure dives may also be available depending on the qualifications of your instructor including; Enriched Air Diver, Self Reliant Diver and Sidemount to name just a few.

I think the biggest difference with the revised course though is the focus on training divers to become thinking divers. We have already seen this improvement in the Open Water Training and there should now be a focus on expanding and improving this through the Advanced Open Water Course too.

Divers will be responsible for pre-dive planning including assessing dive site conditions, buddy and own abilities, turn times and/or pressures and gas management.

Conclusion

As with all diver training, a big part of the standard of training comes with your instructor and the dive centre that you choose to train with but having these standards in place from the agency means more divers will learn to dive rather that just follow and I for one, would always prefer to dive with thinking divers!!!

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