You’ve just spent 3 days of your vacation learning how to dive (and you loved it!). But now you’re being told that it’s a great time to move on and do your Advanced Open Water Course. What’s the point in doing the next level of training? How will it help you?
Well, of course, you should become an Advanced Diver! The Open Water Course is all about teaching you the basics of scuba diving. The Advanced course will give you more confidence and make you a better diver. Plus you’ll be able to dive deeper!
Here are our top 4 reasons to do your Advanced Open Water Course.
Get certified to dive to 30 metres.
After you’re certified as an Open Water Diver, you’re allowed to dive to a maximum depth of 18 metres. But there are loads of gorgeous and interesting dive sites around the world that are deeper and that you can’t technically get to. So how do you visit these sites?
You become an Advanced Open Water diver and you get certified to dive deeper.
During the course, you’ll learn about the effects that extra depth will have on your body, and how to deal with some of the strange effects you may experience at depth. You’ll play games on the bottom of the ocean at 30 metres to show you how your thinking patterns change so that you can start learning to anticipate them and manage them properly. Because you’ll now have to consider deeper dives and more residual nitrogen in your body, the Advanced course will help you understand why dive planning and proper surface intervals are so important.
Work on your technique and become more confident.
The Advanced Open Water course is only a 2-day course, but it packs 5 dives into those 2 days. This gives you plenty of time to practice your underwater skills. On the Open Water course, you usually spend most of your time just getting used to being underwater, and doing basic self-help skills like mask clearing and regulator retrieval. On the Advanced course, we work on things like air consumption, underwater body position (what we call ‘trim’), proper buoyancy, and even start teaching you how to back fin so that you can swim backwards when you need to. By the end of the course it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll be a more skilled and more confident scuba diver!
Learn how to navigate underwater.
Underwater navigation is a crucial skill to have when you’re out diving. Whether you’re shore diving or boat diving, you always have a ‘place’ go get back to at the end of your dive. On the Advanced course, you’ll learn how to navigate by compass underwater, and you’ll learn some navigational techniques that will help you effectively and confidently find your way around a dive site.
The course will also teach you how to use underwater points of interest to naturally navigate your way around a dive site. This skill can be tricky for some people since you have to notice the points of interest to use them as navigational waypoints, but we’ll get you started down the road to being an excellent natural navigator!
Go diving at night.
That’s right. Doing a night dive on your Advanced Open Water course will certify you to dive at night. You may be wondering – why on earth would anyone want to scuba dive at night?
Do you think you know the ocean? Oh, you have no idea. Night diving is the only way you get to see what happens under the waves after the sun goes down. Nighttime is when the big fish in the ocean get hungry and go out looking for meals. On Whiterock dive site, where we usually do Advanced course night dives, we regularly see huge barracuda and groupers eating fish right in front of our eyes! Night diving is one of the most interesting things you can do with a scuba tank. Truly. The underwater world at night is totally different from the underwater world during the day.
Have we convinced you yet?
Of course we have! We are ready to start the Advanced Open Water course any day of the week – the only thing missing is YOU!
Head over to our booking page to reserve your spot on a course, or get in touch with us if you have any questions.
