Whats your favorite/most important advanced class to take? I am very interested in getting quite a few of these (already have my EAN), and was wondering what yall have done before, and what you have gone to complete first.
looking at doing night, nav, deep, and wreck soon!
(also i use SSI if that helps!)
You already have OW and nitrox, so you have the basics already. Past those, there are three reasons for taking classes imo:
1. You need the certification to do something you want to do (i.e. Advanced if you want to go on dives through an operation that requires you to have advanced to join their dive trip etc.).
2. You believe that you will learn beneficial skills from the course that you wouldn't easily figure out without taking the course or otherwise learning from someone else directly.
3. You wish to have a professional instructor help you in the water (this is often a reason that newer divers, not yet confident in their skills, will chose to take an "easy" specialty as it gives them some new skills on a small portion of 1-4 dives under the supervision of an instructor for the entirety of the dives).
Courses that I think commonly fall into #1 include:
A. Nitrox
B. Advanced/AOW
C. Drysuit (in some places)
D. Most tech courses and their prerequisite courses if going that route
Courses that I think commonly fall into #2 include:
A. Rescue
B. Drysuit
C. Self-reliant
D. Sidemount
E. Cavern
F. Peak Performance Buoyancy (only IF your instructor for OW/AOW did not cover this topic with you sufficiently, which is sadly the case for many divers).
G. Navigation (for some, this comes naturally, others need a lot of mentoring to get this set of skills down well).
H. Search and Recovery (similar to nav, this can be a very helpful class for some and quite useless for others).
I think pretty much any course can fall into #3, including the above.