SHARK! Just kidding.
Now that I have my Rescue Diver course under my belt, Mark and I have been working on my PADI Advanced Open Water Certification. Typically the AOW is what comes first but I’ve never been one to do things the logical pedestrian way. The advanced course really isn’t that difficult, there’s no test, it consists of completing five “adventure” dives, and each has a corresponding reading and worksheet and a few skills to complete underwater. Its mostly just good fun diving, unless of course your boyfriend is the one teaching you and you have issues with Not Being the Expert, and you are having unexplainable buoyancy issues in the pool and you may or may not be weighted correctly and your bcd is far too small and you have to clear your mask constantly because its filling with tears. Other than that its a bucket of laughs.
These photos are from the open water portion of my Peak Performance Buoyancy dive, one of the least exciting but most important adventure dives. Our friend Andy lent us the camera again so we could do some documentation of my dive education (ha). The pictures aren’t that fantastic because, um, we weren’t really listening when he told us how to use the camera. I swear when people are paying me the pictures look better than this.
There are so many options for which Adventure Dives to do but I’m also going to do Night Diving (my personal phobia), Deep Diving (ummm, don’t tell PADI, or my Mom for that matter, but I’ve already been to 180 feet), Fish Identification (Mark’s an expert) and probably Photography and Videography, since um, I already do those all the time. I’ve actually completed a Wreck Diver adventure dive when I was in Malaysia, but it was a year ago so it can’t be applied. Why did I do it then? Basically PADI is a moneymaking genius and for certain dive sites, such as deeper dives or wreck dives or night dives, you must be an Advanced Open Water Diver and if you are merely Open Water you need to complete it as an Adventure Dive, aka they charge you double for the pleasure of filling out a worksheet, and then they have the hooks in to sign you up for your Advanced Course (“You’ve already completed 1/5th of the course!).
Well this has been an informative post full of capitalizations and parentheses and run on sentences, and I’m feeling a bit winded, so I’ll just move onto photos then.
My lovely, patient instructor, swimming into some more sharky looking things
My first ever squid sighting
OK, what, or who, is PADI??
Whoops guess I should have clarified… PADI is the Professional Association of Dive Instructors, aka the world’s largest recreational diving membership and diver training organization, aka The Godfather
I’m thinking of doing our Advance PADI cert either in Tioman Islands or Bali/Gili Islands. Was the advance cert more difficult than the initial open water cert? What types of skills were required to complete underwater? For open water I had some difficulty with the water treading test and also the mask removal under water.
Hey Minh! Actually in most ways the advanced certification is a lot easier than the open water. There’s almost zero time in the classroom and the in water skills are fun — no mask removals that I recall 🙂 However becoming a stronger swimmer will only ever help you — I strongly recommend investing some time in that if it’s something you struggle with!