What really is an "Advanced Open Water" diver?

[Bob DBF]

Double post

 

[lowwall]

Point well taken. My concern is that because they have a card that says "Advanced Open Water" they have it in their minds that they are now free to push the envelope. So to follow your suggestion I'll ask the question: "What skills must a diver possess in order to be an Advanced Diver?" I'd like to weave that into my prevention which may now be on the theme of what separates and AOW certified diver from a truly Advanced Diver. Keep the ideas coming! And thanks!

Can we first define competency in an OW diver? I'd start with actual mastery of the basic OW skills. Not "OK, you've successfully cleared the mask once in a pool after a dozen tries and then one more time when prompted while kneeling on a platform at 20'". Mastery should mean a skill is second nature, you can do it at any time, anywhere without having to think about it. And, crucially, being able to do everything midwater without any dramatic depth changes.

Beyond mastery of the basic skills, a competent OW diver is one that maintains a decent level of awareness. Awareness of the environment, of physical location relative to the planned course and exit of the dive, of the location and condition of his or her buddy, of remaining gas and NDL time. And perhaps the most important factor, awareness of the limits of his or her abilities.

The last thing that characterizes the competent OW diver is the ability to stay calm when faced with an obstacle, think through a plan of action and then execute it, again without large deviations in depth.

Now competent doesn't necessarily mean advanced. Perhaps the competent diver doesn't have perfect buoyancy control. That's fine as long as they know it and stay a couple of feet instead of a couple of inches from the bottom or elect to go over rather than through a tight swimthrough. Maybe their nav skills aren't great, so they use a guide or stick to easy to navigate sites.

My point is that if you make competency the requirement for OW, then there is no point at all to the current AOW cert as the useful content of the AOW course would have been subsumed into OW.

There would still be a reason for specialty, professional and technical certs for those who wished to learn new skills or hone existing ones. If you really want to bestow the label "Advanced Diver" then give it to anyone who completes a course that requires a demonstrated level of planning and diving precision well beyond that required for OW. Like Tech 40 or Divemaster.

 

[scubaozy]

Most important point of aowd is you gain experience under supervision. Yes, owd course produces autonomous divers but with only 4 dives of experience. At that stage, additional 5 dives are not so marginal, if you take aowd straight after owd, you will double your level of experience. OWD is introvert, you will focus on your self for learning motor skills, aowd is mostly extrovert (excluding obligatory dives), this is the point you start undertaking activities beside core skills.
Course goals are well documented in the manuals as well as in marketing documentation. I am wondering why this question is even being asked.

 

[Rukkian]

As a PADI MSDT Instructor I teach PADI's AOW certification. This means that someone fresh out of OW class (4 open water dives) can do 5 more open water dives for a total of 9 open water dives and have a certification card that declares that they are an "Advanced Open Water" diver. I am sure that my fellow instructors will agree that this individual is not truly an advanced open water diver.

I am working on a presentation around this question so any opinions of what truly constitutes an Advanced Open Water diver will be appreciated! I have my own opinions of course but would love to hear from the ScubaBoard crowd.

Thanks for your input!

I actually did this - my next dive after ow was AOW. It seems counterintuitive, and a misnomer, but that is only if you try to say advanced means experienced. You are advancing because you are now trained to go deeper. The biggest benefit, (and partly why I did it) was that I was planning on doing some dives on vacation, and for a small amount of extra money, was able to do the AOW and get some personalized attention from an instructor versus just being part of a large group. It was my first certified dive in salt water and first certified off a boat, so the extra attention was really good. I also learned quite a bit. Since I have started diving more often, and continue to learn.

 

[Lorenzoid]

@boulderjohn has posted about the history of AOW, and it helps explain what it’s really about.

 

[VikingDives]

Then they have not been trained to WRSTC standards. Any instructor that has not trained an OW diver to plan and conduct, NDL dives when accompanied by another certified diver should have their instructor card pulled.

If they are not fully qualified divers they should not get an OW card. I guess you know the quality of training you provide, more than I.

That is still the WRSTC standard. And should be the minimum standard of training, imho.

There are three issues here, training, competence and knowledge retention.

The training I give exceeds agency and wrstc standards (five dives minimum open water, students performing skills in neutral buoyancy etc.) but at the end of a course, they still have only five dives. That doesn't make them competent to jump on a little rubber boat with an instabuddy and do a dive somewhere they've never dived. They're fully competent to dive where they've been trained though.

My students will demonstrate competence during training, but I know that they aren't going to necessarily retain all of it. Have you ever watch a scuba refresher? Scuba skills are perishable. Especially after open water. Any instructor has seen a fair amount of panicked divers, but your average diver hasn't. I've you've ever dealt with a diver panicking in the water, imagine what it would be like for a brand new open water diver to try and help manage that situation.

When I was an open water diver, I'd taken a five year break from diving. I did a short refresher and went on some dives in the carribean. On one dive, there were about 20 divers following a DM. Some of the group had just finished their resort dive training.

I watched as the group swam through and completely silted out the entrance and I had decided that I was going to swim over and meet the group once everyone was through. As the last two divers approached the entrance - a husband and wife that had just been certified and were on their first dive after OW - I saw the husband swim up to the wife, who was kneeling on the sand and breathing really rapidly. They had a little underwater arguement that when like this:

Him: Swim in there.

Her: No, you go.

Him: YOU GO SWIM IN THERE!

Her: NO, YOU SWIM IN THERE!

Eventually, he swam into the silted out hole and her eyes looked like they were saucers. I remember thinking that she was about to bolt for the surface so I swam up to her and asked if she was OK. Even though she was clearly not OK, she replied back that she was OK. I gestured to her that we would swim over, rather than through and she quickly assented. At the time, I was thinking that I should hold her hand, but I wasn't sure that was appropriate...

The point is, I instinctively handled the problem, and it worked out fine, but I was just making things up as they went along. I didn't have a plan for, or any idea of what to do if, she bolted for the surface.

That dive was my cue to resume dive training. I realized that though the industry said I was competent to dive, I lacked sufficient training to handle and react to problems outside of what I'd been trained.

As far as WRSTC standards go, I can't find anything in them about teaching shore diving. In fact, to meet WRSTC standards, an organization doesn't even have to teach basic skills like breathing off a free-flowing regulator. Here's the link if you want to check it out:

https://wrstc.com/downloads/03 - Open Water Diver.pdf

To summarize, it isn't about training quality, it's about not knowing or having sufficient experience to deal with problems that makes me say they aren't qualified to "drive on the freeway" right after open water training.

 

[tursiops]

there is no point at all to the current AOW cert as the useful content of the AOW course would have been subsumed into OW.

Much of what you and others want to see in a "competent OW diver" comes from experience and mentoring. The stated purpose of AOW is to let people try out a few things and see where they want their diving to go. It is a sampler course, not a "fix OW" course. Do you like the environmental side of being underwater? Try Underwater Naturalist and Fish ID, see if you like it. And take Fish ID from a REEF.ORG instructor who actually knows something about fish. Do you like wrecks? Take Deep and Wreck. Do you like cool skills like Search and Recovery? Did you just get a new camera and want to short-circuit 300 pages of poorly translated Japanese in the manual, or improve your composition skills? AOW is a sampler course; take Wreck and discover you don't care for wrecks. Fine. But five sampler dives gives you minimal new skills....it is a taster to find out what you like on the smorgasbord. Only the NAV dive digs into the material a bit, and even that does not make you a navigation specialist. If you were a marginal OW student, you will be a marginal AOW student; chances are it will not "fix" anything.

 

[Searcaigh]

I've often thought about what really makes an Advanced Diver

Should it be the number of logged dives? Given that some people never dive beyond their local environment or only on holiday in some benign conditions, perhaps not.

I guess I could call myself an Advanced Diver as I have dived in fairly diverse geographical regions of the world from the UK to the Middle East and Africa as well as SE Asia and Australia and in a mixed range of sea conditions, but never in fresh water or in a quarry or under an ice cover or in a proper cave.

I've only ever dived back mount, but not a rebreather or side-mount, but I have dived on a surface supplied gas.

So, at what point or more correctly after what specific experiences should one be called an Advanced Diver?

 

[Jim Lapenta]

When I certified through PADI the instructor actually said I was now qualified to dive with a buddy from class without any supervision and I was. Depending on the site and conditions. Inland freshwater lake with 10-25 ft vis at 3500 ft of altitude. He still pushed me to get AOW shortly after and I did. I didn't know at the time that some of the stuff in my AOW class should have been taught in OW.
I found that out when I crossed over to the YMCA and NAUI at the DM level and helped with a YMCA class. Completely different animal and standards.
As an SDI Instructor now, I still teach the same class I did as a YMCA instructor because standards not only allow it but encourage us to add to the course.
So I still do a full session on watermanship before putting them on SCUBA that involves snorkeling and free diving skills. We still cover tables and emergency deco procedures using the Navy Tables, and rescue skills in the class. Minimum of 6 pool sessions with 8 being the norm.
AOW the way I teach it, has minimum entry and exit requirements and is not a sample of "advanced" dives. It introduces all new skills and knowledge.
I wrote my own course and stayed within the standards while at the same time going way beyond them in what has been traditionally presented.
I put my entire philosophy and class in my second book and along with the required agency text, use it as the student manual.

 

[Bob DBF]

As far as WRSTC standards go, I can't find anything in them about teaching shore diving.

It states to plan and conduct dives, so a diver should be able to do that from wherever they enter the water.

So, at what point or more correctly after what specific experiences should one be called an Advanced Diver?

Any time one wants, as it has been done since I started diving. It used to be that being a diver was enough, I guess its title inflation.