But AOW it is not necessary to dive deeper. 43% of my dives have been 80 ft. or more, the last reaching 110 ft. last year (Big Tunnels, Grand Cayman.)
You're right in the sense that there is no scuba police. However, if something were to happen on such a dive, the operator could possibly get themselves into severe legal problems so most operators stick to the recommendations. There are, however, as you point out, operators who will take that risk.
And just to be clear, I'm saying "risk" here to mean a legal risk. The divers themselves may be perfectly ok at those depths, but legally it's still a risk.
Me also. I have threatened to take AOW the last 1 ½ years but opted not to due to circumstances with my dive buddy. I and my buddy are taking it next week while in Playa del Carmen (already paid for so we're committed!)
I would be curious to hear your impressions of the course. You have quite a bit of experience for someone taking AOW. I don't run AOW very often and usually just for people who request me specifically but my impression is that most AOW courses I've seen are pretty superficial.
As a bit of a side-bar I'd like to run through how I did AOW last season with an old student who had a lot of experience. Since AOW is geared toward inexperienced divers, I needed to find a way to challenge him but without going so far that it no longer resembled a PADI course. I needed to think about it so this is what ended up doing. Maybe this could be interesting to you as well.
For the components of the course he did PPB, navigation, wreck, night and deep.
Initially he didn't like me suggesting PPB and he said that I couldn't improve his buoyancy control. So I took him on a "check out" dive, which is optional and I challenged him on that and told him that I could get him to lose buoyancy control in 1 min or less. I subsequently demonstrated that this was true as a function of task loading. All I did is get him into a hover above the bottom as we were descending, and then I distracted him with a "fake" problem I was having. The exercise ended when he impacted the bottom
. I told him I could teach him what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future so he took PPB.
In PPB dives (I did 2). On the first dive we did exactly what is in the standards and there wasn't a lot of meat on the bone left for him, as he predicted. The 2nd dive included working on maintaining stable buoyancy control in a non-trivial diving situation. So we worked on individual skill and "juggling" tasks; executing, delaying and delegating tasks to other team mates and relying more on instruments for depth cues than you might normally do. The culmination of this was a swim through a dive site at about 8m above the bottom (bottom was just within visibility) while combining several tasks; for example, stopping to write something on a slate, or changing direction, communication tasks, simulated 'issues' in combination with my ABC approach etc. So I showed him the correct way of "chaining" the extra tasks in combination with maintaining buoyancy control, He came out of it much more confident than he was, to say the least. It wasn't the "standard" PPB though. I added an extra dive, which I had to make clear was beyond the scope of the PPB requirements, so he had a chance to integrate what he had learned. He agreed so we did that. (As an aside to this, I've had to teach these same principles to several of my technical buddies because it is entirely possible to become a "technical" diver in this world without fully grasping the concept of a "task chain" or that you can delegate a task to team mate. I'm pretty sure that quite a few instructors teach this but I'm also pretty sure that it's not normally an agency requirement. If you want to know what they mean when they say "it's all about the instructor", it's this.... )
Secondly, he really wanted to do the AOW wreck dive, but the wreck dive is really easy so I had him map the contours of a small wreck (about 15m long) in bad conditions (after a heavy rainfall). Visibility was next to zero (1-2m). He did it with a prepared wreck reel I have where I've tied knots in the line every meter in order to make it into a measuring device as well as a guide line. This was also good for confidence and he came away with some reel skills (and real skills) as well as having done the dive. This was good for confidence as well and was a good intro to what he could encounter if he were to dive on wrecks on the North Sea. Basically this was just combining some elements of dives 1 and 2 from the specialty.
For navigation we also did 2 dives. He told me that he could swim the 30m square blindfolded and I agreed (I had this student before so I knew his basic skills very well) so like the PPB we did the standards dive first and and optional dive after that. For the optional dive I had him swim a very large square using a combination of compass, time and depth signs over an entire dive site, probably 400m total distance with part of that being swimming on a compass heading in mid-water with no visual reference except the buddy (me) and a need to manage compass direction and depth/buoyancy control as we went (ie. using what he learned in the PPB part again). We started at a very recognizable point and he came out *exactly* on that point again after about 45 minutes. This was good for confidence. As far as standards went, I had to tell him again that the second dive was beyond the scope of the course but that I thought it would be good for him to try it. He agreed so we did that.
For Night and Deep we didn't do anything special. He had done some deep diving already and deep diving for the AOW course where I live is a little tricky so I mainly focused on telling him where it was possible to dive deep safely around our local area and we did a dive at one of those sites. The night dive, which is one of my favorites, we did in a local lake, where I had him navigate the dive (repeating navigation skills) as well as enjoying the wildlife. This went a little further than standards dictate but he was ready for the role of leader in a buddy team so I asked him to lead instead of follow.
At the end of this process I overheard this diver saying to the shop owner that I had "turned him into a real diver". He was that already, of course. All I did was expand the PPB and navigation parts of the course to address the main two points of development I could see. Frankly, I had a lot of fun with it because you don't normally get experienced divers in for AOW and it gave me a good chance to look at how you can create a firm challenge without going completely overboard with it.
Obviously, in order to raise the bar with certain elements, you need to "get creative". I'm not saying that you should ask your instructor to do these same things with you but since you have a fair amount of experience already, it would be good to challenge your instructor to "push" you within reason and not just go for the lowest common denominator. That is, of course, if you're looking for a course where you can learn something new. If you're just looking for the card then the instructor has room to whip off the dives and certify you with next to no effort as well.
R..
