How do you choose your Advanced Open Water speciality

[MaverickDiver94]

Just received my Open Water through SDITDI and also recieved the Nitrox Certification (not comfortable applying in real world yet since the instructor didn't have time to provide physical Nitrox training). Due to my discomfort with the first instructor, I found a Padi Advanved Open Water Instructor who also agreed to provide some training for Nitrox. He advised that Padi requires a few specialty for the Advance Water completion (tuition includes the minimum speciality requirements. Charges $100/each, if I wish to do addt'l specialities).​

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Can you guys tell me any speciality you recommend or specialities you wish you had done when you did your training? I love options but my goal is to become a good diver with safety as my #1 priority.​

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Addt`l helpful info: My goal is to eventually start a worldwide underwater Scuba Diving cleanup + Marine animal rescue group or club. Definitely plan to get my Rescue Diver probably go as far as technical diving. At the current time I don't see myself ever going into caves. ​

(Feel free to message me if you require more info to further assist)​

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As always, Thank you all and safe diving!​

 

[Vicko]

Peak performance buoyancy, navigation, deep and night dive should be a must in my opinion, anything else is "for fun" and you should pick what you find the most interesting and useful.
I never did boat diver for anyone until I got a guy who dived only from shore and has never made a boat dive in his life, he got a lot more out of that "silly" speciality than he would have from wreck or similar specialities that most people choose.

 

[Beau Holden]

If your you have serious thoughts about going anywhere technical and if i had it to do over again knowing what I know now and all the money I have spent along the way. Here is what I would do.

Go ahead and get the certification for deep, navigation and rescue done and I would stop and get some diving in. Don't stress about physical nitrox training. Not anything to really train on, if you have the knowledge base down.

Don't know if you own your gear at this time. If not start planning and buying with the end in mind (technical diving). Find and dive with divers better and more experienced that you. Research and read every thing you can on the fundamentals for tech or better diving. A good place to start is the book Doing it Right - The fundamentals of Better Diving and start learning those skills. Get a 100 or so dives in under different conditions. Then after that you should have a good idea on what to do next.

I myself said the same thing early on about not doing caves. Then one day (about 7 years later) I decided I wanted to get that training and now, it's really the only diving I prefer to do. I'm not a snob about any other diving and I do like open water diving. However, cave training was the most rewarding training I have ever done

 

[tursiops]

There may be some confusion here. PADI does not require ANY specialties for AOW. It does require 5 "adventure" dives, which are the first dive of a full specialty. Two of those MUST be Deep and Navigation; the full Deep specialty is 4 dives total, the full Navigation specialty is three dives total. So, for AOW, you get to choose 3 dives in addition to the one Deep dive and the one Navigation dive. Those 3 electives are not entirely up to you, for there may be logistical reasons that do not allow some of the choices. Most importantly, buoyancy is critical, and your own interests need to be factored in.

 

[boulderjohn]

Just adding to post #4....

As it was stated, the adventure dive required for the class is the first dive of a specialty. You can choose to take the full specialty when you are done if you wish, or you can decide you have had enough training with just the one dive. It's all up to you.

If you decide to take the full specialty in the the future, then the first dive of the full program is already finished. That is true even if you wait 5 years.

 

[TMHeimer]

Navigation and whatever else applies to the type of diving you plan to do. Buoyancy, if you need it. Possible choices would be Deep, Wreck (if you want to penetrate), Night. Again, if these are dives you'll do. Nitrox will probably come in handy on some dives. In short, stuff that improves your diving and safety and/or what may interest you.

 

[SlugLife]

I choose classes based on the type of diving I want to do, and not based on badges/stickers/cards/certs/etc from an agency.

Addt`l helpful info: My goal is to eventually start a worldwide underwater Scuba Diving cleanup + Marine animal rescue group or club.

I'm not one to tell people to not pursue ambitious goals, however what you describe would be far more than a full-time job, and would depend far more on business-skills than dive skills. Unless you're talking about a small local group that occasionally travels. Perhaps see if such a thing already exists; it may be far more practical to join an existing organization, perhaps one which already comes with funding, organization, training, etc.

Anyway, underwater cleanup frequently deals with entanglement hazards. Nets, rope, line, debris. These kinds of things often require the right tool for the job, and a certain degree of knowledge about how to avoid getting entangled yourself. Commercial scuba-diving course may actually be the way to go, although I'm not familiar enough with commercial-scuba to recommend specific courses.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Why not go the full courses route? That will be more in depth.

 

[boulderjohn]

Why not go the full courses route? That will be more in depth.

Read ScubaBoard long enough, and you will encounter hundreds of posts ridiculing specialties for skills that people feel do not even need any instruction, let alone a multiple dive specialty class. Most of that ridicule is misplaced, because for some people that full specialty is both valuable and necessary.

But for others it isn't. For some people, what they learn on a single dive in a course is all they really want or need. They won't know that, however, unless they give it a try. The original idea of the AOW class was to introduce different kinds of diving to people to see if any of those interested them. If they were interested, they could go on for more. If they were not interested, they could look elsewhere for areas of training they liked and needed.

That still makes sense to me. Get an introduction and decide if you need or want more training. If you do, go on and finish the specialty. If not, look for some other area to spend both your money and your training time. If you sign up for the full specialty and decide after the first dive that you have had enough, then you will spend the rest of the class regretting that mistake.

 

[Vicko]

Is it against PADI standards to do the full speciality courses during the aowd?