Looking to get friend certified; first time doing this - can anyone help?

[AlexRD]

Thank you all for the great responses! I've decidedly gotten comfortable enough with my diving that I want to share with friends and the big thing is most of them are timid about diving without someone familiar in the water. I think I'll go with the recs here and look for local shops

 

[Kharon]

Deleted

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

Thank you all for the great responses! I've decidedly gotten comfortable enough with my diving that I want to share with friends and the big thing is most of them are timid about diving without someone familiar in the water. I think I'll go with the recs here and look for local shops

Not sure where in the states you are located but RAID advocates all skills be done neutrally buoyant rather than kneeling so that might be something to look into.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Not sure where in the states you are located but RAID advocates all skills be done neutrally buoyant rather than kneeling so that might be something to look into.

They are the first to do that AFAIK. I hope they shake up the industry and everyone follows, as this is a good direction.

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

They are the first to do that AFAIK. I hope they shake up the industry and everyone follows, as this is a good direction.

I hope so as well which is one of the reasons I am taking my Advanced 35 class through them. I also love that they do not sell books for classes. All the training material is online which saves paper and lowers the cost of the courses.

 

[Efka76]

Still can not understand how it is possible to get OW and AOW certifications during 2 days. For me it took 5 days to get OW only. 1 days spent watching videos, 2 days for reading materials and doing confined water dives, 2 days for 4 dives. We did not skip anything, did all required exercises and dives.

Now, I will go to Thailand for AOW cert. It will be combined AOW and Nitrox. It will take 2 days. I think that your instructor skipped many things if OW and AOW were squeezed into such short period of time.

 

[Neilwood]

Still can not understand how it is possible to get OW and AOW certifications during 2 days. For me it took 5 days to get OW only. 1 days spent watching videos, 2 days for reading materials and doing confined water dives, 2 days for 4 dives. We did not skip anything, did all required exercises and dives.

Now, I will go to Thailand for AOW cert. It will be combined AOW and Nitrox. It will take 2 days. I think that your instructor skipped many things if OW and AOW were squeezed into such short period of time.

OW can be shortened if the study part is done on line via Elearning. My OW was 4 days including class work but if I had done Elearning (at extra expense?) it would have probably cut a day or more off that.

 

[JohnnyC]

So you did 9 open water dives plus 2 pool dives in 2 days and were certified for OW and AOW? What agency was this with exactly? You don’t happen to have the instructors name and the name of the shop do you?

 

[Bob DBF]

Instructors name should be on the cards.


Bob

 

[stuartv]

So you did 9 open water dives plus 2 pool dives in 2 days and were certified for OW and AOW? What agency was this with exactly? You don’t happen to have the instructors name and the name of the shop do you?

I interpreted this

I did a 2 day weekend course, intensive-ish, for both OW and AOW.

as doing OW in a 2 day weekend course and then later doing AOW in a 2 day weekend course. Thinking he meant it was ALL in 1 weekend is just, well, there's just no way that happened.