Specialty Courses

[GeekDiver]

Kuang,

Yep That exactly what I'm sug. The crew packs are in the neighborhood of $25-$30 range depending on where you get them. You will know what your getting into from the books and will have the course knowledge with out paying for an entire class that will cost $100-$125 or so for the instruction plus materials.

I'm not sug that you should just buy the books and start diving with out the full class but at least this way you won't have any big suprises if and when you decide to take a class.

If you haven't taken the AOW class I would sug taking AOW first. The book for AOW covers alot of the basics for the other more popular classes not to mention you get to make 5 try it dives for seperate specialities such as Deep, Nav etc.etc.etc...

If your thinking of Nitrox I would sug to look at how close your current profiles are to NDLs vs how much Air you had when you surfaced. You dive Nitrox to extend your NDL. The deeper you go the less impact it has with more risk depending on the % and pp. Nitrox isn't specificly safer than Air but, Nitrox if improperly used has a much greater risk than air. (the Nitrox Book will state the same)

Hope this give you a bit of food for thought. It's always a tough decision on how and why we spend money for scuba.

Geek

 

[diverbrian]

I did a combination course of night/limited visibility, drysuit, search and recovery, and navigation. Our dive shop owner believes in nitrox strongly and includes it in the open water course. This is to his benefit as he sells preblended EAN 36 as well as triple filtered air.

I see the use in most of these courses if you wish to speed up the learning curve a little. At the least, a diver should be able to find his/her way home if something happens, deal with low visibility (especially in the lakes where I live with all the silt), and nitrox tends to be more safe than air AS LONG AS THE PO2 LIMITS ARE RESPECTED and it is not treated as a magic breathing gas, but as a tool. Sooner or later, deep diving is recommended as many operators want to see a deep dive cert to take divers to the best wrecks.

This is my opinion, but at least one instructor in the shop backs me on this.

Brian C. Palmer
SSI Advanced Open Water/ IANTD Advanced Nitrox