If I had my own dive shop, and was able to teach classes my way, I would teach OW and AOW at the same time. As far as I'm concerned, OW is an introductory course designed to teach you how to breath underwater and to handle some emergencies. This only trains you to dive to depths no greater than 60 ft. OW only focuses on the basics of every skill such as neutral buoyancy and compass navigation. It will take more dives and possibly more instruction to master these skills.
From what I've seen, maybe 20 percent of divers who take OW will still be diving after the first year of certification. That being known, would I still want to waste the time and money to teach the extra classes to someone who will not use it after a couple months???
AOW (from a PADI standpoint) goes on to teach the basics of deep and navigation as well as 3 other specialties of your choosing. It builds on the knowledge and skills you picked up in OW.
I am a believer that every diver should be OW, AOW, and Rescue certified at the very least. Who knows, you may go on your first dive ever after OW certification and have your buddy panic and have an air embolism on the way up. Basic OW training doesn't train you to deal with that. You can build rescue skills in with the OW course, or better yet, train everything there is to know about rescue during the OW course. Now you're looking at additional time spent in the classroom and on dives not to mention the cost necessary for the instructor to make it worth his while.
Times have changed from when people first started getting certified and classes are getting a lot shorter. Now days, courses are set up to build upon each other, so if you skip one step, you won't learn everything on the next step. And these dive operations that require AOW to do some dives, I agree with them 100%!! I don't care if you have 500 dives to 100+ ft, they don't know that for a fact and would require a quick checkout dive to demonstrate your skills. If you want to see a logbook to prove experience... well, I'll show you my true logbook, or the one I'll make up with thousands of dives including decompression dives, trimix, cave, ect. Anybody can fill out a logbook, but for liability purposes, having the AOW card in your name and in your hand is the best way to go.
So YES. I think divers should have AOW.
From what I've seen, maybe 20 percent of divers who take OW will still be diving after the first year of certification. That being known, would I still want to waste the time and money to teach the extra classes to someone who will not use it after a couple months???
AOW (from a PADI standpoint) goes on to teach the basics of deep and navigation as well as 3 other specialties of your choosing. It builds on the knowledge and skills you picked up in OW.
I am a believer that every diver should be OW, AOW, and Rescue certified at the very least. Who knows, you may go on your first dive ever after OW certification and have your buddy panic and have an air embolism on the way up. Basic OW training doesn't train you to deal with that. You can build rescue skills in with the OW course, or better yet, train everything there is to know about rescue during the OW course. Now you're looking at additional time spent in the classroom and on dives not to mention the cost necessary for the instructor to make it worth his while.
Times have changed from when people first started getting certified and classes are getting a lot shorter. Now days, courses are set up to build upon each other, so if you skip one step, you won't learn everything on the next step. And these dive operations that require AOW to do some dives, I agree with them 100%!! I don't care if you have 500 dives to 100+ ft, they don't know that for a fact and would require a quick checkout dive to demonstrate your skills. If you want to see a logbook to prove experience... well, I'll show you my true logbook, or the one I'll make up with thousands of dives including decompression dives, trimix, cave, ect. Anybody can fill out a logbook, but for liability purposes, having the AOW card in your name and in your hand is the best way to go.
So YES. I think divers should have AOW.
