Man! I'm glad to talk about anything but you know what...
I thought the nav part of AOW was the best part. The natural navigation over a billion pieces of salt grass on the bottom with no distinguishable features other than more and more green blades, all about 8 inches long left me (on the simple 30 kick cycles out and back) off by about 15 degrees. Kind of embarassing, but a good lesson that natural nav has many limitations and is inappropriate in some conditions.
The use of the (damned) compass that seemed to lock up in spite of my best efforts to keep it level yielded much better results in the 30 KC square. Think there was no current at the time, which is a great help, but I was interested to see if I could get around the square solely by looking at the compass and not looking up to find a coral head or rock or whatever. The compass left me bang on at the end of the dock, but about 1 KC long - gave me a great deal of confidence that the compass actually works.
Couple questions - first what kind of requirements are there for the Underwater Navigator or equivalent? Do you do anything more interesting than go out in squares?
Second, I have a terrible sense of direction U/W! My son seemed to have a much better idea of where he was going and where the boat was. On the surface, like in a car, I do pretty well - even without a compass. I'd be really interested in learning how to surface somewhere near the target, especially if that's a boat floating on the ocean - even more especially in rough seas, where even seeing the boat is a problem when you're only 6" tall - that being the height of your eyes. Not to mention surfacing and going back down to avoid currents is probably not the best idea w/r/t calculating your dive time and avoiding DC problems.
Terry