When I was teaching, the Advanced Course I offered through SDI was a minimum of 6 dives.
1 Advanced Skills - Refine buoyancy and trim, DSMB use, stage bottle use, and communication, non-silting kick techniques
2 UW Navigation - Compass, natural, line and reel/spool, sharing the responsibilities with a buddy
3. Night/Low Vis - Our local conditions can go to zero vis quickly. Light selection and use, touch contact, swimming and communication
4. Search and Recovery or Wreck (survey wreck) Lift bag use, line and reel use, team skills. Wreck - outside survey, locate hazards, entry and exit points, orientation, and identification because no one without actual wreck penetration training has any business in an overhead environment.
5 Deep - planning, stage/deco bottle use, narcosis identification using an actual dive skill. What I usually did was have students descend to between 80 and 100ft, depending on location. Tie off a reel and swim as a buddy team for a distance, with one watching depth and time. Stop, turn, and switch roles. Get to the tie off and begin ascent using simulated deco stops to control ascent. Somewhere right after starting I'd spit out my reg and give an out of air signal. Their reaction told me how narced they were. Usually, stops were planned for every 10 ft starting at 50. At 20 we'd switch to the stage bottles using proper notox procedures and do the final two stop on those
6 Buddy skills and assist (rescue skills). Non-responsive diver from depth as a team, no guided no mask 100ft swim and then switch roles. No mask guided no mask ascent from 20 ft. Descend and switch roles. Then buddy team would do a rescue tow to entry while loosening the victims gear.
I came up with the dives based on the most common interests of my students who were often planning on diving the Great Lakes, cold quarries, or wrecks in various locations. I did not offer things like Fish ID or photography. Fish ID was not my passion. Better instructors for that. I had actual underwater photographers who were not instructors that I referred photo interested students to.
The order of dives was intentional because all dives built on the previous ones. And I had minimum course entry requirements of being able to do all skills neutral and horizontal with less than 2-3 feet change in buoyancy. We usually managed to get that down to less than a foot in the class.
There was also around 6 hours of classroom instruction on equipment, dive planning, gas management, and emergency procedures. We used my second book -
"SCUBA: A Practical Guide To Advanced Level Training" as a supplement to the SDI materials.
I welcomed single tank divers, those using doubles, and sidemount. The last two may seem strange, but I had DMs and a couple of instructors from other agencies take my advanced class to see what I was doing. As well as those who had taken AOW from someone else and didn't feel they got what they paid for.
