AOW? Joke? Meaningless?

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Back in 2001 I had been diving for nearly 40 years but was frequently asked by instructors from some agencies to do a "check out" dive because they didn't recognize the level of training involved in my agency's "OW" course. While on the Great Barrier Reef, I encountered a PADI instructor who not only recognized my agency and its training, but referred to my 1960s c-card as a "museum piece." I took PADI's AOW course with him for just the cost of the materials. It made next to no difference in my diving skills (although I did learn a few things) but now none of the other agencies questioned my skills level. Sheeez.

Back when you were first learning to dive (1967, IIRC), another diver ran into a similar problem in Australia. He had gone there for a week of intense diving off of a boat. The captain asked for his C-card. He didn't have one. He explained that his father had taught him to dive, starting when he was only 7 years old, and he had completed thousands of dives since then. The captain was not impressed. No card--no diving. He could hang out on the boat for the week while everyone else dived, but he could not go in the water. Several crew members met with the captain and begged him to make an exception for this one case, and the captain relented. As soon as the diver got back home, he went to the local PADI shop and got certified so he would never have to go through that again.

His name was Jean-Michel Cousteau.

I am pretty sure that this diver, the second human in history to dive on that new-fangled SCUBA device, learned nothing during his certification class, but he recognized that it was something he had to do.
 
It's important to note that certified and qualified are two separate, yet very important factors. Most people who are certified as AOW divers are in no way qualified to dive to the limits of their certification for many dives afterwards. It's not a joke, but for many divers, having the ticket is a gateway to gaining that experience, for better or for worse.
 
Couldnt be worded better...

It's important to note that certified and qualified are two separate, yet very important factors. Most people who are certified as AOW divers are in no way qualified to dive to the limits of their certification for many dives afterwards. It's not a joke, but for many divers, having the ticket is a gateway to gaining that experience, for better or for worse.
 
Sorry for the off-topic reply. If you are using a strobe, then you can bring back some of the red. If you don't have a strobe or some sort of artificial light and you are at depth, the red is just gone. Nothing in photoshop or LR can bring what isn't there back.
Exactly true. However, the question was about the ability of the human eye/brain to compensate for the lack of color (when talking about the color patch test during AOW deep dive), and even that can't bring back what is not there. Quite a few times I have found a splendidly colorful critter sitting on top of a dull colored coral and taken a picture with flash, just to find out that the coral was actually bright red and the critter that seemed to stand out so well in fact pales in comparison and seems to be lost in the bright red background. Manual white balance correction on the other hand, performed at the depth of shooting, provides a strikingly accurate estimation of the world I saw when I was down there. Or that's how I've experienced it in any case.

But wrong forum and wrong topic, last OT post from me.
 
I've noticed that there is a huge difference in US trained divers and non-US trained divers. Non US trained divers seem much more skillful than US ones. They generally have decent buoyancy control, are comfortable in the water.

Not sure I'd agree 100%, but I know what you are saying. I find British and Scandanavian trained divers tend on the whole to be pretty good. But the quality of some Asian trained divers (yeah, I'm looking at you, Japan...) can be patchy. And Russian divers I normally consider a statistic waiting to happen, although that is more about mentality than training.
 
Not sure I'd agree 100%, but I know what you are saying. I find British and Scandanavian trained divers tend on the whole to be pretty good. But the quality of some Asian trained divers (yeah, I'm looking at you, Japan...) can be patchy. And Russian divers I normally consider a statistic waiting to happen, although that is more about mentality than training.
And if you ask the Japanese, it's the Chinese divers who are a DM's worst nightmare, so I guess it really depends on who you ask :). Although I must admit the things I heard about Chinese divers when I was diving on Okinawa were on a whole different level...
 
I am pretty sure that this diver, the second human in history to dive on that new-fangled SCUBA device, learned nothing during his certification class, but he recognized that it was something he had to do.

You have to make the gatekeepers happy, sometimes you just have to show your stinking badges to get where you want to go.
I had to get OW and later AOW to continue diving where I wanted to go.


As for "the second human in history to dive on that new-fangled SCUBA device".
From The Silent World
Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan

SCUBA has been around a long time, as have rebreathers. WWII made development faster than it was advancing prior to the war, as was the case in a lot of technological areas, and then later used in the private sector shortly after the war.

Jean Michael was 8 in 1946, three years after Jacques Cousteau began diving the prototypes of what became the Aqua Lung, Émile Gagnan was a noted dive buddy of his at that time. It was a small group of divers in the early days of SCUBA, not just one family.



Bob
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The day I can't dive anymore, I will really need some other good reasons to stay alive. DarkAbyss
 
Jean Michael was 8 in 1946, three years after Jacques Cousteau began diving the prototypes of what became the Aqua Lung, Émile Gagnan was a noted dive buddy of his at that time. It was a small group of divers in the early days of SCUBA, not just one family.

I worded it carefully to describe only the final version of the Gagnon-Cousteau collaboration, but I just checked my source (Jean-Michel Cousteau's autobiography) and saw that I misremembered the series of events that followed the arrival of the prototype at their house.
 
I had a similar experience. I don't so much fault the instructors as I do myself for waiting so long to take it. If I had completed AOW at 25 dives, I likely would have felt differently than I did at 100 dives. I think that is where people go wrong with it.
 
So, have read most of the posts for this thread. Interesting discussions. I finally received my AOW this January while on the Explorer Ventures T&C II. They somehow convinced me that even after 1600+ dives, it would be a good thing. Thanks to my instructors for helping me learn a few things about advanced navigation, underwater plant life and fish. You can always learn something from an experience if you want to and you can always make sure you learn nothing if you want to.

Get to know your diving skills and then get the AOW. You will appreciate it a lot more.

Don
 

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