Minimum required training to dive to 30m (100ft) with Padi

[OMyMyOHellYes]

It's still weird. The PADI Nitrox course I took was watching the instructional video, writing the test and analyzing a couple of tanks. All of that you still need to do if you want to take the specialty. The idea of the adventure dive is to do 1 dive of a specialty. Nitrox is a diveless specialty. It does not matter that some shop have you do the course and take you out with a Nitrox tank, it's not required.

It exposes a brand new diver to a facet of the dive experience to which they didn't encounter in the basic OW class and applies it to a dive. That, with the very limited knowledge gained, in sum total, is the ONLY thing that the adventure dives (AOW cert dives) are supposed to accomplish. Basically supervised experience diving with limited exposure to other disciplines of diving is what AOW consists of.

That some of the dives, for a very limited time, may count towards one of the dives in a given specialty is lagniappe and not an objective of the AOW cert. And even then, it is up to the discretion of the advanced instructor as to whether those count towards "advanced" specialty certs - "Yeah, you did a night dive as part of your AOW course 9 months ago, but no, we're going to go ahead and do the full three night dives now for your night card," (I did my AOW cert at AKR and returned 10 months later intending to complete the night cert on that trip, and that's exactly how it played out) or "No, it was 12 1/2 months ago so none of the dives you did as part of AOW count towards any specialty certs."

I already had my Nitrox cert on my first real dive experience, but had I not, a 15 minute brief followed by application on a real dive would have been a much better instructive experience than say a "boat dive" (jump off/get back on boat) or "fish identification" (Look! Fish! Yellow striped fish!) or "under water naturalist" (Look! A big fish eating a little fish!) adventure dive would have been. There is a specialty dive cert through PADI "Zombie Apocalypse Diver" that I suppose could be done as an adventure dive, but Nitrox would probably serve to make a new diver a better diver.

 

[BoltSnap]

wouldn't the lessons be better reinforced by planning the dive, diving the plan and executing the new skills? For example going through the need to locate an analyser, calibrate the analyser, analyse the gas, mark the tin, then diving within the "hard" depth constraints that nitrox brings. Not forgetting that you should see the benefit of longer dive times within that depth constraint.

This ^^^^^

The classroom only Nitrox course/certification is least useful if it doesn't have practical experience especially as related to real dive planning including repetitive dives and dealing with imprecise gas mixes.


(Unusual for me to agree with @Wibble )