AOW Electives WHICH ONES?!?!?!?

[ScubyDoo]

In my opinion Peak Performance Buoyancy is by far the most important class you can take. Every dive you make from now on.....whether its a wreck dive, a drift dive, taking photographs, wall dives, etc....is greatly affected by your buoyancy skills. Good buoyancy skills help protect reefs, reduce air consumption, extends bottom time, decreases stress, decreases entanglement potential....the list goes on and on. I highly recommend this as one of your electives.

My dive shop selected our 3 electives for us. PPB was not one of them, so I went ahead and took it anyway in addition to my AOW adventure dives.

Night diving is no longer required for AOW....just Deep and Navigation. I would also recommend taking Search & Recovery. It will come in handy eventually when someone you know accidentally drops something overboard, or even if you just stumble across something neat while diving. You may find a 40lb ships bell laying on the bottom that you would really like to keep, or maybe an old anchor, or someones weight belt they dropped.

Boat Diving and Wreck Diving are also two to consider. Chances are you are going to be doing both in future if your not already.

Have fun in the Caymans!!! I envy you!!

 

[Scubamedicjoe]

well first one would be the Peak Performance Bouyancy
second would be wreck since with these two and the others will give you a well rounded class and experence

 

[Scuba446]

Are all these 'specialties' really necessary? I mean, I would like to take my AOW at some point - but not have to pay for 3 MORE specialty courses.

AOW is like $250 and each specialty is like another $150 each at my agency.

Thats gets pretty expensive...

Are there any GUE courses yet that offer certifications that any agencies recognize?

 

[DiverDave]

Scuba446

Seems to be a spot of confusion between the specialties and the AOW. The way PADI has set up the system is that you have to do 5 speciality dives to gain the AOW cert, of which deep and navigation are compulsory. The specialty courses are courses of 2 to 4 dives (some are non-diving eg O2 Admin, Equipment) that teach the necessary skills for dealing with different situations in diving. Typically the AOW "specialty dive' is the first dive from the Diver Specialty course. You do not have to complete any specialty courses to complete the AOW.

As for which I think are worth doing:
Wreck - definately
Night - things are very different in the dark
PPB - especially if you are taking AOW without many dives yet
Search and Recovery - quite useful
Drift - common type of dive so worth knowing the procedures
Dry Suit - if you are in the colder parts of the world it is a good introduction

Boat is the nonsense one. Most dive shops do it coz its easy to do and has no u/w skills.

By the way, anyone doing the AOW can do it on Nitrox and get that course out of the way at the same time. Seems to be a very common combination.

Dive safe,
DiverDave

 

[Welshman]

Peak Performance Buoyancy is IMHO the most valuable of all the elective dives in AOW.