Choosing The Right Adventure Dives For Your PADI Advanced Open Water Course In Phuket
An Advanced Open Water in Phuket gives plenty of adventure dive options. So it can be difficult choosing the right ones for you. Your experience level, chosen venue and conditions on the day can all help narrow down your choices.
No Choice On The First Two
Deep and Navigation are compulsory dives on the PADI Advanced Open Water in Phuket or anywhere else. So that will leave you with three more adventure dives to complete the course. The Deep dive will take you to a maximum depth of 30m. This is a maximum and can be conducted shallower if the dive site topography and conditions don’t allow. The Navigation dive will get you more familiar with the compass. Allowing you to navigate using different methods and patterns than what you were taught on the Open Water course.
Now It Gets A Little Tricky
There’s a total of 22 more choices for your remaining dives. Some of them we don’t do at Local Dive Thailand so we’ll list these first to narrow it down – some are obvious and require no explanation. The others we will explain why.
- Altitude – requires a dive at 300m or above, we haven’t got any bodies of water suitable (bar some very ropey looking swamps) for training at that elevation
- Dry Suit – although technically we can and have, you would have to ask why you would want to do this in 29c water
- Full Face Mask – We haven’t got any and don’t know anybody who has
- Ice….
Wreck Is A Very Popular Adventure Dive
The next list is of dives we can do put are either impractical or incur additional costs:
- Cavern – although you don’t actually need a cavern, we don’t visit any sites on a regular basis to gaurantee being able to conduct the dive
- Diver Propulsion Vehicle – Additional cost THB 2,000
- Night – Our boat runs day trips, however you can do this dive on Similan Island liveaboards or if there’s 2 or more students we can do beach night dives between November – April
- Rebreather – Additional cost THB 8,000 and can only be conducted in a pool
- Sidemount – Requires a confined water (pool) dive – additional cost THB 1,500
Where Is It???
If you’ve already received a manual or signed up for elearning then you maybe wondering why you can’t find some of the above mentioned dives, don’t worry you haven’t been been short-changed, some of the dives require reading from specialty manuals and are not present in the Advanced Open Water literature.
If you want to complete all your study before starting your dives you can knock a couple more options out and the choice narrows to:
- Boat – hmmm..
- Digital Underwater Imaging – Take your photography skills to the next level
- Drift – Most of the time it’s a difficult dive to conduct but we do get some decent current
- Fish I:D – A fun and informative dive that will stop you going all the way through the entire library to get the name of the fish you spotted
- Peak Performance Buoyancy – Improve your control and confidence
- Search & Recovery – Great fun! More navigation and using lift bags
- Underwater Naturalist – Learn more about the underwater environment and how it all works together
- Wreck – We have a quite a few nice wrecks for you to explore
Don’t Know What This Is? Then Take The Fish ID Adventure Dive
Our Recommendations
Every diver is different and quite often the best way to select your adventure dives is to talk to your instructor. Identify your strong points, weaknesses and any particular interests that you have. You can also do this with our office staff before arrival if you’ve signed up for elearning.
As a general rule of thumb, taking into account our dive sites, facilities and schedule. We recommend three from Peak Performance Buoyancy, Wreck, Search & Recovery, Fish I:D, Underwater Naturalist and Digital Underwater Imaging but as previously mentioned every diver is different and we’ll accommodate as much as we can.
Honourable Mentions
Enriched Air Nitrox has not been touched on so far and it is available as an adventure dive although not in the manual. It’s probably the most popular and useful of the PADI specialties. For that reason we recommend that you take the specialty course and not just the adventure dive. Our boat has a Nitrox membrane system, it’s always available so of course you’re more than welcome to take the adventure dive and try before you buy.
DSMB (Delayed Surface Marker Buoy) Again not in the manual but a DSMB is an essential piece of dive equipment and one that every scuba diver should have. It’s not an expensive piece of equipment and knowing how to deploy one safely could literally save your life.
AWARE Dive Against Debris A brief but useful introduction into the very important subject of pollution in our oceans and what you can do to help.
AWARE Shark Conservation Every diver should by now be aware of the plight of sharks. Learn just how important these apex predators are to our oceans and how you can help save them.
Self Reliant Diver This goes against the PADI mantra of always diving with a buddy but there are certain situations when it’s necessary or preferable to dive alone. This adventure dive won’t teach you the all of the very important associated safety measures and again we recommend taking the full specialty.
So hopefully this has made choosing adventure dives a little easier. When you contact us at info@localdivethailand.com to arrange your course, you will be answered by experienced PADI instructors so please feel free to ask as many questions as you like.
By Justin Hartrey
Posted in The Archives on .
