Advanced Open Water

PADI’s Advanced Open Water Diver course is not for advanced divers! It is designed to take you a step beyond the Open Water Diver course and advance your skills and further build your confidence.

The Advanced Open Water course consists of some independent knowledge development and five open water dives. Two of these are required dives and the other three we can select from a list of options. As with all things PADI, we have some
flexibility in how we do this. You can do it in two stages: complete the independent learning and three dives to earn the Adventure Diver certification, then complete the final two required dives to become an Advanced Open Water Diver, or simply sign up for all five dives at once and skip the intermediate step.

The two required dives are underwater navigation—we’ll add to and build on the skills you acquired in the Open Water course, and deep diver where we will develop the knowledge and skills you need to go beyond the 60ft limit of your Open Water certification.

The only prerequisite for the Advanced course is to be certified as an Open Water Diver. And the Advanced Open Water Diver certification is a prerequisite for other specialty diver certifications and for Rescue Diver. After that, you are well on your way to becoming a Master Scuba Diver, or to thinking about diving as a profession and becoming a PADI Dive Master.

All PADI courses should be fun and all are performance based—you can’t fail the course—if you don’t get it straight away, we simply keep working at it until you do. Having said that, obviously there is a little extra stress and concern about the Open Water course—it’s inevitable--you’ve never dived before. Similarly, for Rescue Diver, there is a little added pressure thinking about the fact that if you need to apply some of these skills, it means you or someone else is in trouble and you have to deal with it. Advanced Open Water Diver is different. You don’t have to worry about “can I do it?” You’ve already demonstrated that you can. This is simply all about developing new skills, building confidence, and having fun.

Counterintuitively, if you go beyond this, most people actually get the greatest sense of achievement—and have the most fun—in the Rescue Diver course. However, that may be partly due to the fact that you built so much confidence here in the Advance Diver course!

The cost for the Advanced Open Water Diver course is $375 for the eLearning material, five dives and the gear rental ($315 if you prefer the manual/video rather than eLearning for the independent knowledge development). As with the Open Water course, if you opt for the manual/video approach, we’ll schedule additional time to discuss the knowledge reviews and answer questions.