The PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course is meant to develop your skills underwater while giving you a taste of some of the most popular specialty diver courses.

During the course, you will make a total of five dives. Two of the dives are "core" or required dives. These consist of a navigation dive where you will gain more experience in the use of the compass and techniques for efficient underwater navigation, and a deep dive, which is conducted at depths over 60 feet, to introduce the proper techniques for planning and conducting deeper dives.

To round out the five dives, the last three are considered "elective" dives, and may include: underwater photography, drysuit dive, boat dive, drift dive, search and recovery dive, or even a wreck dive!

The Advanced class is meant for those divers recently certified as Open Water Divers, in that you will gain more experience in a variety of environments under the direction of a PADI Instructor. Many folks say "....I'll get Open Water certified, then when I get real good, I'll come back for Advanced....". Not the case! We conduct lots of Advanced classes for experienced divers, but the class is meant for you who just recently got certified!

There is very little classroom time during the course; in fact, most of the discussion is done right at the divesite! The whole course is concentrated on introducing practical diving skills instead of classroom lectures.

The Advanced Open Water class is also a prerequisite for some of the specialty courses like Wreck Diver, Ice Diver, and Search & Recovery Diver.

Answers to frequently asked questions for this course may be found here.

Your next step would be Emergency First Response,
then Rescue Diver or Specialty Courses