Cool stuff your instructor did in your Advanced course

[sandiegoaes]

My NAUI advanced in 2001 was a lot different than the current course. It was all about diving the advanced sites around Monterey. We’d learn the skills required to do things like rock or rough surf entries, then go do them. Navigation was at a site the required several different nav skills to complete the dive. So, you’d learn all of the advanced skills, but also learn how to dive many of the advanced sites. It was a super challenging course, that would occasionally have people drop out when the diving went beyond their comfort level.

Once you’d completed your certification you were invited to join future classes on any of their training dives- cause they were really just going diving at some fun local sites.

Everyone who had the opportunity to take that AOW has some great memories of being challenged while doing their first dives at what are now some of their favorite sites. And instructors loved teaching it, because it turned beginner divers into confident independent divers.

Out of curiosity, who did your Advanced class?

 

[landphil]

Out of curiosity, who did your Advanced class?

It was with Aqua Safaris in Santa Cruz back when they were a NAUI shop. Since then I’ve also taken PADI advanced at Aqua Safaris (with my 12yo daughter while she did her class- figured I was driving her to all of the dives anyway) and a couple of years ago, NAUI Master with Bamboo Reef in Monterey. PADI advanced was just OW+. But the NAUI MSD was a little like that old advanced class- that might have been because I was the only student, though . It was a lot of independently planning, then executing dives that demonstrated the required skills.

 

[sandiegoaes]

It was with Aqua Safaris in Santa Cruz back when they were a NAUI shop. Since then I’ve also taken PADI advanced at Aqua Safaris (with my 12yo daughter while she did her class- figured I was driving her to all of the dives anyway) and a couple of years ago, NAUI Master with Bamboo Reef in Monterey. PADI advanced was just OW+. But the NAUI MSD was a little like that old advanced class- that might have been because I was the only student, though . It was a lot of independently planning, then executing dives that demonstrated the required skills.

Both are excellent shops!

 

[grantmac]

No, dir skills make you better at doing dir skills, just like our advanced instructor bringing along
his jet boat and plonking it in a volcano to collect lost anchors made us better anchor collectors

When you have skills you can choose to use them, when you don't you can't.