AOW vs GUE Fundamentals

[Diver0001]

Interesting question but I am long past AOW but would like to take the fundies class, it would truly be an advanced class.

I'm late to this party, but I don't agree with this statement 100%.

First of all, for practical reasons. A dive op in some resort or other is going to be looking at your *qualifications* for insurance reasons. If you have Fundies but you do not have AOW then you could be treated as a OWD due to insurance concerns. The reason being that Fundies doesn't *qualify* you for anything outside the GUE system that gives an operator anything they can use to cover their ass with insurance. Some are more strict than others. Your limitations will depend on that.

On the other hand, that's not to say that Fundies is a pointless course. I haven't taken it myself (for full disclosure) but I have witnessed it being given from close quarters and I think there can be no doubt whatsoever that if you have taken fundies, even if you did not "pass", that you will be a better, more aware, more alert diver for it.

The differences between these courses make it hard to compare them. Fundies takes a limited number of topics and "goes deep" on them. Buoyancy control is one of those. Gear is another.... and what new(ish) diver wouldn't benefit from that! AOW takes a broader/more general approach to the theory and a (much) shallower approach to in-water skill. It's really a case of apples and oranges. They are totally different courses designed to achieve totally different goals.

...Which leaves the question, what should the OP do? My answer to that would have to be "it depends". AOW is a gateway course that qualifies you to make deeper dives and opens up options in terms of electives that will "qualify" you (on paper at least) for certain activities. This has value. Fundies will take any creases out of your buoyancy control and introduce you to a mindset that could have great *continuing* value to you as a diver.

If you can afford them both then I would say take them both. If you can't then take AOW but make it a policy to dive with much more experienced divers for a year or two.

R..

 

[MikkelBC]

Do both.
I have both, and there is no comparison. GUE fundamentals will transform you as a diver, but the majority of dive professionals that I have met around the world do not even know what GUE is. From those who do, my Fundamentals cert earns me immediate respect.
For practical reasons you should still get an AOW.

 

[boulderjohn]

I would like to add one more point to emphasize the fact that the courses are so different in purpose and content that there is no point in comparing them.

The content in GUE Fundamentals is taught by just about every agency in some course(s) in their curriculum. That includes PADI. For most agencies, it is in a course labeled something along the lines of "Intro to Tech." Remember that the origin of GUE Fundamentals was exactly that--an introduction to the GUE technical courses in cave diving.

 

[AdivingBel]

AOW & GUE Fundies, apples and alligators. It's too bad folks have had bad experiences with AOW. It's so much about the instructor (and the student ). I lucked into a buoyancy guru. Every dive was a trim and buoyancy dive (along with whatever the speciality was supposed to be). Had boat problems one day. He said, "Want to go to the pool?" We spent all day in the pool working on finning techniques etc. There are some really wonderful instructors out there that love to teach. Based on many of the experiences I've read on SB, I've been really fortunate. I'm sure there are some lunkheads out there, but I fear much of what you read is like tripadvisor. Mostly the bad ones get the writeups.

The other side of the coin is AOW is the travel card. Without it you set yourself up for unnecessary hassles. I'm not crazy about it and if you choose to be the "rebel" more power to you. I like easy when I vacation. If you tell others to skip AOW 'cause it's a crap class, they need to keep this in mind as well. Good diving.

 

[Nasser]

PADI is by FAR the most universally recognized agency in the world so getting AOW is probably a good idea.

Like others have said, these two courses are quite different and not really in direct comparison

If you want to become a better diver... find a great instructor regardless of agency and dive as much as you can. If you're curious about the GUE/DIR approach to diving, then consider taking the GUE Primer course which is only 1-2 days and will give you an overview of what the system is about. If you are willing to go straight into Fundamentals then great... go for it... it certainly won't hurt you and may even encourage you to continue with GUE.

Just remember that an agency sets minimum standards (some may be higher than others) but what makes the entire experience worthwhile is a great instructor/mentor that will go beyond the minimum and teach you and inspire you to become a better diver.

Then the rest is up to you.

 

[DivemasterDennis]

Different courses, different purposes. In my AOW course we focus on mastery of buoyancy and trim, and then task loading: search and recovery, lots of navigation, deployment of spg from depth. We also do a lot of dive planning. It is an extension of aow to hone skills and get "natural" in the water." The GUE class has other focus. Our AOW here: navigation dive, deep dive, search and recovery dive; wreck dive (on a plane- no penetration and an altitude dive, where we engage in depolyment of lines, and lot of buoyancy work. It is a good class, but it is not fundies. I agree with others- take both. But note- quality and intenstiy of AOW classes varies alot, even within the standards.
DivemastyerDennis

 

[TSandM]

boulderjohn, I agree with you that most agencies teach much of this material in Intro to Tech, and I will also agree that the ORIGIN of the Fundamentals class was as a workshop to prepare people for GUE's technical classes.

But the class has evolved well beyond that, and it's sad for me to think that someone would wait until they had technical aspirations to learn the material in the class. The requirements for a recreational pass from Fundies are what the name of the class says they are -- fundamental. Solid buoyancy and trim, tolerance of task-loading, situational awareness, and consideration for the team are the in-water skills. The Nitrox curriculum which we went through yesterday was very solid and in depth. I am eagerly awaiting the decompression module, as it will be quite different from the one I originally took, but it's far more than exists in an OW class. And of course, the gas management considerations are very central, and the student exercises (GUE's equivalent of a knowledge review) on this topic are extensive.

I thought after I took it, and still think today, ten years later, that this is a class that every recreational diver ought to take. My husband disagrees with me, because he thinks the class ought to be gear-agnostic, which is why he wrote his Techreational specialty. It is funny, though, how many divers change their gear after his class, despite his efforts not to push them to do so. They see what works.

 

[Lorenzoid]

Did my advanced training through LA County ADP two yrs ago with over 100 hrs of training which entailed every sat/sun for 2 1/2 months. . . .

It's good to see people mention options for advancing one's diving other than GUE Fundamentals. A few instructors with other agencies have chimed in here to mention other options, and now you mention LA County. For one whose main source of diving information is Scubaboard, it might be easy to be led to believe GUE is all there is in this respect. The fact is that there is a vocal GUE community on SB. GUE is becoming better known--globally even--but it's still just a small blip on the radar in most places compared with PADI, NAUI, SSI, etc.

When I made a decision to advance my diving, I chose GUE Fundies in part because there was a lot of talk about it here on SB, but perhaps more significantly because I realized that GUE mecca and a bunch of GUE instructors are located just a 5-hour or so drive from where I live. If I lived elsewhere, I might have chosen a different way to advance my diving.

Advice to the OP: If you're considering GUE Fundies, ease into it by taking GUE Primer first. And also take AOW.

The talk of an AOW versus Fundies "card" made me realize I never received a physical card to recognize my hard-earned Fundies recreational pass Is there one? I want a card. Waah! A Fundies card will be useful for, I dunno, scraping ice off my windshield in the morning.

 

[Aotus]

I think there have been different versions of aow. Some say they learned a lot and really spent time in skills, and some (myself included) saw and instructor who just phoned it in, and found the "manual" to be very superficial in coverage and not worth the $$. Part of it may be the instructor, sure, but it sounds to me like some classes in the past were really designed to hone skills, while the current PADI aow doesn't necessarily offer that, but rather just a sampler of specialty classes to draw the diver in for more $$$. After my aow, I went to a tech instructor and he was shocked that I had an aow card without having ever done a night dive. He thought night dives teach certain fundamental skills that (he thought) were required for aow. I think the "advanced" in the name is an almost criminally ignorant misnomer.

For some perspective, here are some highlights from my worthless AOW class:

1. "Peak performance buoyancy" 1 dive. Depth about 12'. Visibility, 3-5'. Shore dive. We spent 15 minutes, in waves, trying to figure out how much weight we should be wearing. Then we swam together in a line parallel the shore, about 30' then turned around, losing a member of our group, then surfaced, regrouped, Done.

2. "Deep dive" 1 dive. Depth 85'. Visibility 30-40'. We 6 students went down with 1 instructor, upon making it to the wreck at 85', one student was already down to his turn pressure and was sent back up by himself. The other 5 of us swam along the wreck for 30', turned back, ascend. No task to try like in the book, no colored sheets, no lights, and certainly no discussion of gas management.

3. "Wreck dive". Exactly the same as above, same location. This time one student had a calf cramp and decided to sit out, upset that he wouldn't get enough (5) dives for his aow card.

4. "Navigation". Shore dive. Depth 20' visibility 40'. This one wasn't too bad. Each of us were sent off to swim a square. Except for the fact that we were all sent off alone, it was a good practice dive.

5. "Search and recovery" at same location as #4 after surface interval. We were looking for the buoy we saw from the shore. Diver who'd missed the wreck dive is instructed to also "appreciate the fish" and this dive would count as 2 dives, a search and recovery dive and an underwater naturalist dive. We went in together, found the buoy, and then everyone went their own ways, essentially turning the whole thing into a first solo dive for everyone except me and the buddy I wouldn't let get away from me. the guy with the cramp earlier wanders up the shore and freaks out in the waves, thinks he's drowning in 4' water (he's easily 6'5") and calls his dive early (still gets his "2 dives" though). Another one keeps losing the weight from his BC and making uncontrolled ascents.

What did I learn from my aow class? Seek out world class instructors, don't buy Padi card-classes. The point should really be, that the AOW card is just that, a card, and does not necessarily mean anything good about your skills. You can try to find a good instructor, that should make a difference, but signing up for a padi class seems like a roll of the dice to me, wheras sure, sounds like some gue guys are a little intense and zealots for their system, but I've never heard that a gue class is anything but transformative.

 

[boulderjohn]

boulderjohn, I agree with you that most agencies teach much of this material in Intro to Tech, and I will also agree that the ORIGIN of the Fundamentals class was as a workshop to prepare people for GUE's technical classes.

But the class has evolved well beyond that, and it's sad for me to think that someone would wait until they had technical aspirations to learn the material in the class. ...

I thought after I took it, and still think today, ten years later, that this is a class that every recreational diver ought to take. My husband disagrees with me, because he thinks the class ought to be gear-agnostic, which is why he wrote his Techreational specialty. It is funny, though, how many divers change their gear after his class, despite his efforts not to push them to do so. They see what works.

I basically agree with you, although I am more in your husband's class in terms of the Techreational specialty, which, as you well know, I also teach. As much as I agree with you that every diver should take a class that teaches those skills, it is a hard sell for most divers. They simply don't see a need for it, probably because they don't see many divers with those skills and thus don't have an image of what they are missing. It would make that sell even more of a challenge if they were required to buy a lot of new gear to learn those skills. Once they see the benefit, they may well want to change, but until they see the benefit they will have no incentive.