Question about PADI AOW dives

[Hawkwood]

...It will be great if they have a reel on the bottom to allow me to measure 100'...

Don't worry, they are supposed to have a line or some other means of marking out the 100' for you.

 

[rlynch]

AOW is basically dive 1 from 5 specialties. But required are nav and deep. Here they normally do peak per buoyancy, nav, deep, wreck, and an open one according to the instructor (naturalist or recovery). All good skills. If you ow cert then you should do fine.
Have fun with it and remember you kick cycles then go out and do it after as well jot get a good feel for them and a non training real world distance/time/ kick check. If your thinking about it it its a great tool to have in your bag so to speak.

 

[Simon-]

AOW is basically dive 1 from 5 specialties. But required are nav and deep. Here they normally do peak per buoyancy, nav, deep, wreck, and an open one according to the instructor (naturalist or recovery). All good skills. If you ow cert then you should do fine.
Have fun with it and remember you kick cycles then go out and do it after as well jot get a good feel for them and a non training real world distance/time/ kick check. If your thinking about it it its a great tool to have in your bag so to speak.

I try not to have a pre-set pattern of dives for students. I leave the choice up to them, after all, it should be areas they are interested in. I only suggest alternatives if what they choose in impractical (it's hard to do ice diving in the Middle East)

 

[Dr Dog]

Fish ID is pretty useless if you ask me, especially for someone like myself, that dives with 6 different species of brown fish...You know the major fish, you dont need to know if it is a Big eye or a squirrelfish.

I did Peak, Nav, Deep, DPV, Wreck

 

[Searcaigh]

(it's hard to do ice diving in the Middle East)

Perhaps Al Doom will start something at the bottom of the ski slope in MOE or under the ice rink next to the aquarium in Dubai Mall

 

[spectrum]

Hello! I am a new certified diver and am currently taking the PADI AOW course online. I plan on completing the dive portion in December and was wondering which adventure specialties did you decide to choose? Peak Buoyancy, Fish Id, etc.

I think we did Deep, Navigation, Night, Boat (well they said it was boat because we used a boat for the deep dive) and something else. I was at 100 or so dives at the time and it was pretty anticlimactic. 3 points I'd like to offer.
1) If you want to pick your specialties be sure to shop for that options. Many instructors bundle a fixed set of specialties and cal it their AOW course. They may consider them the best suited to the locale or just what they like to do. They may even be the dives that require the most extra gear purchase.
2) Please do SOME non training dives between OW and AOW. If feel you need more instructor time to feel comfortable on novice dives then you need remedial OW. Being task loaded with a compass, lights or diving deep etc won't do anything to shore up a shaky foundation. You need to free up some bandwidth so you can really absorb (and enjoy) the new topics. Having a modest body of experieince will make it much more meaningful. If you want a number I'll say 1-2 dozen dives before AOW.
3) Take diving specialties, non hobby classes. Photography, fish ID, underwater naturalist etc can follow as self learned or mentored leanings. if you are really into something take a real class from an expert on it latter on.

I also had a question about the UNDERWATER NAVIGATION section. How specific are they going to be on the dive? I have a compass but since I am a newbie, I doubt I will be able to navigate a perfect square. Maybe a small square! Do you remember if they required a stop watch to do the navigation or was it just fin strokes? It may be a silly question and I know the course states to expect to navigate a straight line using natural navigation as well as a compass, but I was wondering what everyone's experience was of the adventure dive.

I do not know why but I am a little nervous about this section. I do not want to be concerned I will not be able to make a square and waste a dive doing that! thanks for your help!!

For heavens sake don't be nervous. In my experience any performance that shows you have a clue will suffice. This is a AOW dive, not sign off to be a navy navigator. Plenty of things like current, surge, and site irregularities can conspire to throw you off. I usually see it done in a fairly barren area to make it straight forward. Some instructors even have markers (like rock piles) on the bottom so it's like running the bases. A slight correction at each turn can avoid a big miss on the last leg. Measurement is usually by fin kick which may take some concentration if the site is otherwise interesting. Opposing or cross currents may throw you off so you may try to compensate. This is where having that 1-2 dozen dives of experience gives you a shot at perceiving what's going on. Leading up to the course you will be making dives and may very well be leading. For us dive 2 post OW was a in and out reciprocal dive and it was easy.

Navigation IMO is fairly equal parts of 3 things, navigation skill, site knowledge and confidence. You will begin with little of these. As you develop real navigation skills you may only have topside and briefing information of a site but will have the skill and confidence to fill in the blanks and make sense of it. IMO this may be one of the most significant skills to develop as a diver. I think reasonable buoyancy control comes much quicker for some.

Using a compass underwater is pretty easy and the beauty of it is that you can master it stumbling around in your back yard, a park or almost any where. Once you get accustomed to the eye body coordination of motivating your body while tracking to a compass held level it becomes almost entirely common sense.

Straight line visual navigation is like a playing leapfrog. Visibility will determine the length of the point to point swim. just keep leading forward to landmarks as you swim. This skill is also helpful in perceiving current action.

Again, this is AOW you are being exposed to the possibilities and given a few basic skill to develop as you go.

Have fun,
Pete

 

[Jim Lapenta]

There are also instructor limitations. I would not take an AOW that included say an underwater photographer dive if the instructor was not an actual UW Photo guy who has been published and sold some stuff. Or allow them to toss in a boat dive as a separate dive if all your dives are off of a boat. We have some instructors local that do altitude as one of the dives. ALL THE FRIGGIN DIVES ARE AT ALTITUDE in this one spot. So there's a dive where no new skills are imparted.

My AOW was Altitude, UW Nav, Night, Deep, and Search and Recovery. These were the dives that this shop did as a matter of course. There were options discussed but they were not really offered per se. And they were all done by the book and little emphasis was put on extra information and the Search and Recovery dive was done in what I now consider to be an unsafe manner for newer divers knowing what I do and based on my research into diver fatalities and buddy separation.

It was this experience that resolved me to write my own AOW course and teach it.

 

[DukeAMO]

For AOW, we did deep, navigation, night, peak performance buoyancy (2 dives, to get the PPB specialty), and wreck. Those were dives 6-12 for us. I found all of them very useful except for wreck, which didn't teach us much beyond what we learned in the navigation section. DH and I struggled with the navigation in a square pattern; it took us several tries to master maintaining our depth while counting kick cycles and watching the compass in poor visibility. We had to work out some underwater signals to help each other through it (like stop and fix your depth, then continue on), and we did yell at each other at the surface between dives, but we eventually got it. And navigation's so useful, I'm glad we learned how to do it.

I would like to do search & recovery soon, but it is a more advanced class that's taught over an entire weekend here, and it would be beyond the skills of many new divers. I can't imagine trying to do it on the same weekend when we struggled with the simple square pattern.

 

[Johan Broere]

Have fun with it.[/QUOTE]

There, no need to say more.

 

[iguana751]

When I did my PADI AOW the instructor started in a parking lot with a towel over my head so I could only see the compass having me doing squares and triangles 100 feet on each side.
At the dive site he stretched a 100 foot tape measure on the bottom at about 30 foot depth. Then he had me swim from one end to the other keeping track of my kick cycles, time and PSI used.
I had to do a 100 foot square starting at one end of the tape measure and ending at the other end, then two 50 foot triangles returning to the tape measure at the 50 foot and 100 foot marks.
The visibility was 8 to 10 feet at the time but very little current.