1000RR
Contributor
My daughter and I got certified this past summer (OW, Jr for her - she's 13). We've basically been diving once a month since then and hope to continue that trend in the future. We've also gotten our EAN40 certs. We are very comfortable in the water and have been having a blast down here in Florida. I have thought about (at some future point) doing the AOW but have some questions and maybe a reservation related to the big scheme of things. I/we don't plan to do the AOW just to "have an AOW cert". I am 100% confident that the AOW would make us better divers, just by the nature of taking additional instruction, learning new techniques, etc. I'm just not a "certification" type of person (just for the sake of it), more of a real world "application" type of person. I like the value/benefit side of things and therefore like to be pragmatic in how I spend money in terms of gaining education and real life benefit. So my questions are:
- My daughter will be a Jr diver until she turns 15, which is a little over a year from now. My thoughts are - since she is limited to 60' being a Jr OW and an AOW Jr only gets her to 70' it seems like it might be more worthwhile to just wait till she's 15 to do the full AOW. Thoughts/suggestions?
- As mentioned above, we got our EAN40 cards a little ways back. Since this can be one of the elective dives for the AOW, will it count towards that (one of the additional 3 AOW dives)? Where I'm going with this is - I was thinking of getting her and I into a Perfect Bouyancy class next to fine tune our trim and overall bouyancy control. I'm wondering if I take a class here or there, if it will apply towards the AOW down the road... and if so, does that make the AOW any cheaper at that point in time. If not, I guess it's better to just bite the bullet and do the AOW as a package?
- We are going to Grand Cayman next summer and her/I will do some diving (rest of family not). I priced doing the AOW down there and it seems that once I factor in what the boat trips cost and take that out of their advertised price, the core cost of the AOW is similar to what I see around here in Florida. Seems I can do it for about $270 (plus boat cost). Would you forego doing an AOW while on vacation so you can just focus on seeing the sites, or do you still get to see enough of the sites during an AOW that doing both combined (site seeing and AOW) is a good approach? Thoughts?