PADI Advanced Open Water Diver Course

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.

Advanced Open Water StudentsDuring 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, underwater videography, a boat dive, drift dive, search and recovery dive, night dive, Enriched Air Nitrox 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!

Advanced Open Water materials There is very little classroom time during the course; in fact, most of the discussion is done right at the dive site! The whole course is concentrated on introducing practical diving skills.

When you sign up for the course, you will receive the PADI Adventures in Diving Manual, which contains chapters on all required and elective dives. You only need to read the chapters and complete the Knowledge Reviews for the dives you are going to make; there is no need to read the entire manual.

Or, you can complete the Knowledge Development portion of the course online!
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PADI eLearning

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

Not sure about doing all five dives for Advanced Open Water certification? Then try the PADI Adventure Diver Course where you only need three Adventure dives. The Adventure Diver course can be done in one day, and we have special pricing for our Open Water class graduates!

Still have questions? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Go to our Class/Event Calendar.

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