My AOW students just went to White Star this weekend and the water was 51F on the surface and 47F below the thermocline.
AOW depends on what the instructor wants to include, which organization you take it through and where you take it. I'm NAUI and they require 6 dives: Deep, navigation, night or low vis and the other 3 can be from a list of choices. Some instructors let the class decide which types of dives they want the final 3 to be and some instructors make the decision for the class based on the available diving in the area. My class is run a little differently since I'm based through the university. I have actual lectures in the classroom then the following weekend we do the type of diving we discussed. I also have more dives than most classes, we'll have done 19 dives by the time we're done with this course.
As far as information goes all that really needs to be done is an expanded briefing at the dive site that gives you the information you need to complete the dive objective for example, you may do a little land navigation prior to doing it underwater.
Here's what my class did this weekend just to give you an idea of possibilities that instructors can throw at you:
The class I'm teaching has a lot of good navigators in it so instead of me setting up a course for them to navigate through I had each team set up a course of 3 buoys. They had to write down their headings and kick cycles (we had measured kick cyles along a known distance in the pool) to get direction and distance information to give to the next buddy pair. The second dive they swapped information and tried to retrieve the buoys set by the other team. Let's just say they learned a lot on day 1 and did a 3rd dive to get the buoys they didn't retrieve on dive 2. Day 2 went much better and the buoys were placed and retrieved without a problem.
Ber :lilbunny:
, and i'm curious to know what sort of information is discussed. Just a little more detail then OW, or are new topics introduced? Maybe some experiences, if your willing to share.
