What's Involved in the SSI Advanced Open Water Diver certification?
The good news is there's no studying required at all! Instead your instructor will give you detailed briefings and debriefings for each dive. This will allow your instructor to concentrate on areas that are of interest and useful to you. This is a personalised course, and you will learn about diving in the real world - Real Diving, Real Fun!
Included in the course price are online reading materials for the SSI Advanced Open Water Diver specialty dives. There's a lot of really useful information contained in there. You will also find some review questions. They are designed to help you assess any areas you may need to brush up on with your instructor. It's not mandatory, but we'd like you to read through the material before your dives, if you have the time.
A sample Advanced Open Water Diver course itinerary:
SSI AOW Training Day 1:
On the first day, we'll do two beach dives if possible. We find the beach dives the best way to start the course for several reasons. Firstly, it's easy diving, so if you haven't dived for a while, it's a really nice way to include a refresher in the first dive. Secondly, we have no time limit on the dive, except for your air consumption. On the day trip boats, the maximum dive time is 50 minutes, whereas on the beach dives, we can remain underwater for over an hour; the time limit depends entirely on your air consumption. Thirdly, the reefs on the beach dives are quite small, so there's a huge variety of marine life in a very small area. That gives us the best chance of seeing lots of unusual creatures. We regularly see cuttlefish, stingrays, lots of nudibranchs, scorpionfish, lionfish, schooling barracuda, and many, many more reef fish.
Beach dives lend themselves perfectly to the Perfect Buoyancy specialty, so that is our recommendation. Also, as it's shallow, it's a great dive site for the mandatory Navigation dive.
If conditions are not good for beach diving, or if you would prefer to be out on a boat, we can also offer a 3-dive boat trip on the first day. Contact us to talk through the pros and cons, and which options will be available while you're in Phuket.
SSI AOW Training Day 2:
On the second day, we take you out on a boat trip for the other mandatory dive - Deep dive (30m) plus two others. Our favourite dive site for this is King Cruiser Wreck (also perfect for a Wreck dive) Shark Point (so many soft corals, it's a perfect site to practice photography) and Koh Dok Mai, where the currents can be quite strong, so it becomes a natural drift dive.
If the schedules don't allow us to go out to those sites, we can also schedule a trip to Phi Phi, or Racha Noi and Racha Yai.
These are merely our suggestions, of course. If there's a specialty you'd particularly like to try out, please do let us know.
Find out more by using the contact forms here, send us an email, or message us for an informal chat with our friendly team.
