Plowed thru sounds about right. What dives did you do and in what order? How much classroom time was included before this for the AOW dives? Where did you do it? And let me get this straight. You did the OW checkouts on days one and two. Then threw in a deep dive with 4 other dives somewhere in there? What agency was this with. I could not have done this under my agency standards. How deep was the deep dive and for how long? What gas management planning did you use? How much did they charge you for this cram it all in "course"? Whatever it was was too much. You got a an AOW card with no real experience. It would have been better to just do 9 dives and saved the price of the AOW course.
I do not believe in training for convenience(read profit). I train for safety, skills, and knowledge of the student. I do not allow MY OW students to take AOW with less than 10 dives post OW. If they are not my students they need more than that, an interview, a pool session, and maybe even a couple OW dives with me to see if they are even ready for AOW. I have a refresher coming up next week sometime. Following this the diver is going to Cozumel. When he comes back he is retaking the AOW course with me because the AOW course (with another agency) he took was less than satisfactory and did not offer much in the way of new skills. The refresher we will do will take about 3 hours and most of that time will be spent on getting his weighting and trim down because his OW and AOW courses did not spend much time on doing this. When he finishes with my course he will know how to use gas management, navigate, plan advanced dives, choose the right equipment, and know when the dive is beyond his level and not do it. He will also not NEED a DM or other pro in the water.
If anyone has taken OW and AOW and still needs a DM/Guide to lead the dives as opposed to wanting one for new sites, conditions, find specific points of interest of sealife, they got screwed.
Wow.
I seem to have touched a nerve.
You've implied that the instructors at my LDS cut corners & violated PADI standards.
Answers to some of your questions:
-- The agency was PADI.
-- All the open water dives were at Blue Hole, NM.
-- In addition to the classroom & pool time for OW, AOW added another 4 hours of classroom & 4 hours of AOW-dive-dry-runs in the pool, not including AOW book & video study time.
-- 3 dives Friday, 3 on Saturday, 3 on Sunday. The OW portion was completed with the first dive Saturday morning.
-- 5 AOW dives: Navigation & Night dives on Saturday, Deep, Peak Performance & Altitude dives Sunday.
-- The Deep dive maxed out at 80 feet (you can figure the theoretical depth @ 4600 ft elevation) and was about 15 minutes (I don't have my log book handy for the exact time.)
There aren't many other AOW dive choices available at Blue Hole, but that's a dive location limitation. Blue Hole is a training site and not much more than that. I'm landlocked. I could have flown to Miami for my AOW checkout, at a cost about triple that of doing my AOW at Blue Hole. I could also have put off AOW until later. My choice, done with my eyes wide open.
I'm new here, with only a few posts. You're obviously a regular. Your tone seems aimed at putting me in my place. I don't think I deserved it.