Piecemeal Advanced Certification - Is it possible?

[RTee]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to think that the Adventures in Diving Course (AKA "PADI Advanced Course") requires a lot of prep or classroom time. It's an EXPERIENCE program that allows you to participate in different types of dives under either the direct or indirect supervision of an Instructor. You're diving anyway, right?

I can't tell you the number of people that go through the AOW with us while on vacation because that is the perfect time to do it. Kind of goes like this:

- Interested in UW photography? Kewl. Here's an on-the-beach lesson on the care & feeding our small housed camera. Here's how to use it. Here's how photo u/w works. Play with the camera a bit. These are our objectives for this dive. Got it? Good! Let's go dive!
- Want to do a night dive? Excellent. Here's the do's & don'ts of diving at night. Here's the the primary & secondary lights, strobes, PLLs. This is how you use them. This is how you signal your buddy u/w at night... how close you need to be... etc. Tonight we're going to dive the house reef we just did at 7am this morning. Be here at XX:XX o'clock (an hour before sunset) with this stuff... We'll go over the objectives and then we dive.

Do the knowledge reviews after dinner one night. Instructor signs the paperwork. Done!

There is no time limit between dives for your AOW. If it happens that you did two dives during your vacation & didn't do the other three dives until a year or so subsequent to them, it's still possible to get your AOW. As long as you have a training record of all dives signed off by an Instructor, you can still get the AOW. However, the Instructor will probably require you to do a Scuba Tune-Up prior to any other dives if it has been a year or more since you were last in the water.

FWIW,

No I don't and honestly I am not quite sure what you are implying. For one, I am quite cognisant to the fact that folks can do AOW on vacation...it is a two day course compare a five - six day OW course which folks also do on vacations. I also know very well the book you are referring to as this was the reference manual for my AOW and I will tell you that for the chapters that was covered in my course, we had to read the entire chapters and have the Knowledge review answers written down on an answer sheet before we did assemble for the AOW weekend. Our practical practical sessions (dives) were preceeded by half a day of review of all the theory before we even hit the water. So in my case it was more than just what you described in your post for UW photography or night diving. Yet, if I remember correctly, it also says that those dives that I did could be credited as one of the dives toward the attainment of those very specific specialties, which I never pursued.

And you are right, FWIW, I will believe it when I see it because so far what I have seen, especially when bouncing from one school to another is the fact that unless somebody registered for a private class, all the folks normally go through the same program and end up paying the same course fee for said course.

Going back to your post, may I point out that the individual has never registered for a proper AOW course. He has only done two [-]specialties[/-]adventures dives in addition to his OW certification. Therefore based on what you are saying, he then only has to do three more [-]specialties[/-] adventures dives (buoyancy, navigation and something else to complement his night and deep) and once he has done his last you would issue him his AOW certification...right???

 

[Cosmographer]

Short answer to the OP: yes, you can do it piecemeal (though obviously some instructors might exercise their discretion and disallow it). Now whether or not an instructor that gives you credit for those dives will discount the AOW course is another issue and might depend on your bargaining skills.

To Submariner, I agree with the OP that AOW courses can interfere with fun dives even though they can, as you indicated, be done simultaneously. I did my AOW courses on fun dives, and while some courses were complementary to the fun dive, others (like Nav) spent so much time on the skills (and rightly so) that there was not much time to enjoy the sights. From a cost-perspective, it probably is better to do the AOW all at once, but I think the OP's reason for not pursuing this route is reasonable as well.