PADI Advanced Open Water Course
Overview
The PADI Advanced Open Water Course builds upon what you learn in the Open Water Course and teaches you what you need to safely dive a little deeper. The depth limit for divers certified through the PADI Advanced Course is 30 meters (compared with 18 meters after the entry-level Open Water course of most dive training agencies). Besides learning how to safely conduct deeper scuba dives, the course also covers underwater navigation in more depth and provides valuable extra buoyancy control training.
The PADI Advanced Open Water course allows you to dive to 30 meters together with a buddy in conditions similar to those under which you were trained.
Structurally, the course consists of five dives, two of which always have to be a deep dive and a navigation dive. In recreational dive centres, the remaining three dives are electives, and customers have a wide range of options. At MCP, we try to ready volunteers for the scientific work coming later, and so we make the choices based on our research needs. We always conduct the Peak Performance Buoyancy dive. In it, through various activities and games, you practise buoyancy control, and most people, even experienced divers, find they gain a lot from the practice with our instructors.
We are experts at tailoring the skill challenge to you, so you come away having learnt something, no matter your background.
The fourth dive is usually a dive dedicated to dive safety and rescue, where you will go through certain exercises that actually also form part of the PADI Rescue Diver Course. If you take that course later, the experience you gain here will help you excel. The final dive on the PADI Advanced Course is one in which we focus on safely deploying a surface marker buoy from underwater, which is going to be invaluable later in the program when you want to let boat traffic know you are about to surface, so they keep a safe distance.