Independent Scuba

Review – PADI Advanced Open Water Diver

Here I am continuing the review of different dive courses and the next in line is PADIs popular course – Advanced Open Water Diver. This is a very common course and most people who start with the Open Water course and keeps diving will do this course sooner rather than later.

This course is NOT a course in advanced diving opposite to what the name seems to suggest. It is still very much a beginners course but with some more elements added to the dives. Overall you can say that the Open Water course focuses on teaching the skills and basics of diving and this course is more about the experience of the dive.

Course structure and elective dives

The course is very differently structured compared to the Open Water course. The training is done during 5 Adventure Dives. 2 dives are compulsory – the Deep Dive and the Navigation Dive. The student then gets to choose 3 dives from a number of different dives. Options include:

• Underwater digital photography
• Boat diving
• Peak performance buoyancy
• Multilevel and computer diving
• Wreck diving
• Night diving
• Diving with underwater scooters
• Underwater Naturalist
• Project Aware
• Dry suit dive
• Search and recovery
• Nitrox
• Videography

A diver who has done 3 adventure dives can get certified as an Adventure Diver (which means absolutely nothing – a total waste of money). Upon completion of 5 adventure dives you get certified as an Advanced Open Water Diver and you are allowed to dive down to 30 meters.

Theory for PADI Advanced Open Water Diver

There is no written test for the AOW. Prior to each dive you read the chapter in the manual, complete the knowledge review and your instructor will go through the results and fill in any gaps you may have. That’s it. Often, unfortunately, this is sloppily done and the theoretical part is more of an excersise in order to not violate PADI standards. I think this is one of the major weaknesses of this course but more about that later.

Pool training

There is no pool training for AOW – everything is done in open water.

The Adventure Dives

So – the core of the course is the actual diving. This is not necessarily bad and correctly executed it will be a very good course in spite of the really weak theoretical requirements. The deep dive actually takes you down to about 30 meters and you get to do some pretty good skills that illustrates the problems with diving deeper.

The navigation dive can be good but is often very much a waste of time – it depends a lot on your instructor. Many students go through this without actually understanding why the should swim in a square or along a line. I think this is important but often this dive is simply ticked off in order to meet certification requirements. Not good.

Then we have the elective dives and here the quality varies greatly. The right instructor can make any dive very good but here you often see the lack of experience in instructors. I think that the general problem with AOW is that it is required much more experience from the instructors side than the OW. It is surprising how little some instructors know about decompression theory, marine life or history of the wrecks they are diving. Also – the PADI standards for these dives are ludicrously basic – for the wreck dive for example it is enough to simply swim around a wreck. What kind of development is that?

A good instructor and careful choice of the dives can make an excellent course. I like the triple Night diving, Multilevel diving and Peak Performance Buoyancy for example. If you live in colder countries Dry Suit is good. With a good instructor Naturalist can be excellent but it can be incredibly bad with the wrong one. Avoid Boat diving, Project Aware at any cost.

Conclusion

This is very much a hit and miss. I think new divers should do this course and it gives much more flexibility when going on dive trips. But beware – it is often taught by inexperienced instructors who are unable to do anything but carrying out the PADI standards which are way too lenient. You can pass through this course without actually learning anything and this is scary – I think that it is a big responsibility to dive to 30 metres and many people who are certified are not capable of doing this safely.

I disagree with the lack of a written test and I think it is done like this so it will be easier to sell. Perhaps this course should be more compared to “diving with a coach”. My conclusion is that most rookie instructors are unable to do a good AOW course – it takes lots of experience to be able to flesh out the poor standards and the course is often adapted to suit logistics rather than the students own needs.

So – do the course, but beware. Talk to your instructor beforehand and try to figure out if he or she actually knows anything about the topic they are teaching. Sounds scary? Welcome to the Scuba Diving Industry where you can go from total beginner to high ranking PADI Instructor in 8 months…