Just came back from Anilao. Went there for my PADI Advanced Open Water (AOW) Certification. I didn’t want to get this certification because I don’t think it has value for the money. The fact that people joke that PADI means Put Another Dollar In shows that my opinion is not baseless. But it is a necessary stepping stone for other certifications. So after almost 3 years and 42 dives, I finally and reluctantly decided to get the certification.
I told Ren about my decision and he hooked me up with a class. Unfortunately, he will be unavailable during the scheduled weekend so he referred me to Norman, another dive instructor from Scuba1. I’ve met Norman before during a dive so it was fine. I met up with him and some of my classmates friday night and we proceeded to Ocellaris (don’t go there!) in Anilao.
Advanced Open Water Certification is basically just supervised “advanced” dives. In my opinion, most (if not all) of these should be required basic skills for every diver. That’s why these days, they’re called experience dives. Some of these dives you probably have done already but you won’t get credit for those. You have to be taking an AOW class to get credit. So during the course of the weekend we dived and dived. The class did the following:
- Deep Dive
- Drift Dive
- Night Dive
- Underwater Navigation
- Search and Recovery
- Peak Performance Bouyancy
For the deep dive, we went to Dari Laut. We descended to 30m and explored the skeletal frame of a fishing boat on the site. I’ve done a deeper dive or two before so it was nothing new. Nevertheless, it was interesting because of the wreck.
For the drift dive, we went to Bahura. The current was not really strong enough to drift along with when. I’ved dived once or twice in stronger currents. Again, nothing new there.
For the night dive, the class went to Ocellaris’ house reef. This was the second most exciting dive as I’ve never dived at night before. The undersea environment looks different. And the bioluminiscent plankton are cool! Wave your hand and glowing lights follow in its wake.
The underwater navigation dive was also done at the house reef. I screwed up the navigation. Reviewing my compass navigation is definitely in order X-(
The search and recovery dive was also done at the house reef. This was the most exciting dive. The teams were allowed to plan and dive without a dive guide. My team defined a search area and did a patterned search of the area to no avail. It turned out that the item we were searching was not even in our search area. But even though we didn’t find the item, it was still a ground-breaking (water-breaking?) experience for me and, I suppose, also for everyone in the class.
For the final dive, the peak performance bouyancy dive, we scooted over to the house reef of nearby Vistamar where there’s another wreck: a fishing boat hull sitting at the edge of a sloping wall. We played around with our bouyancy while exploring both the wreck and the wall.
And that was that for becoming an advanced open water diver B-)