So you’ve completed your Advanced Open Water.
Likely spent your post-cert high in a google rabbit hole, researching how to get your next fix. Y0u consulted scuba FB groups, Insta accounts, trusty Reddit threads and studied charts of arrows pointing from AOW to Deep Diver to EFR to Rescue. The collectively agreed “logical” next steps for AOW divers.
But here’s the thing, scuba diving is not one-size fits all. These black and white listicles fail to take into account your personal needs, interests, and experiences as a diver. Recommendations for an AOW certified diver with 14 dives will be different from an Advanced Open Water diver with 100 dives. Or an AOW diver with a heavy interest in shallow coral ecosystems will likely prefer a different path than an underwater canyon enthusiast.
So when we sat down to write this guide, we took Scuba Seekers’s signature approach and created a tailored, comprehensive guide that takes these variables into account. The end result is more than just a list – it’s a breakdown of recommendations for divers with different experiences and personalities. It is not a checklist of courses to tick off in a rush to “complete them all” but rather an exploration of available options we hope will encourage you to seek out what excites you the most about the underwater world.
It was designed to get you thinking about who you are as a diver and what you want out of your dive journey.
Advanced Open Water Diver with 10 – 40 Dives
1. Dive, Just Dive
This will always always always ALWAYS be our first piece of advice for anyone who has freshly completed a course. There is no substitute for experience and we encourage every diver to continue developing their newly learned skills through the tried and true method of good ole fashioned practice.
If the word practice brings on childhood PTSD of after-school homework sessions, just remember this is diving – where practice can be made fun! The benefits of earning your Advanced Open Water certification is you’ve now sampled many different types of dive styles. Start your “practice” by exploring the types of dives you enjoyed the most.
Loved the thrills of exploring 30m canyons? Continue discovering various topographies at 30m of depth. Captivated by nocturnal creatures? Do a night dive every night of your next dive holiday. Prefer deep water entries via boat rather than entries from the shore? Sign-up for daily boat dives. Enjoyed doing the absolute least amount of effort? Explore more drift dives around the world.
Continue cultivating the diving style you love and it won’t feel like practice, we promise.
2. Learn More About the Science of Diving
It’s one thing to know how to dive, but an in-depth understanding of the why of it all is key to making you the best diver you can be. It’s something most divers don’t study or learn until they reach the Divemaster or Instructor levels. However we believe it should be essential learning for all certified divers – no matter their level. Especially as it improves your overall safety as a diver.
The Science of Diving program provides an extensive study of physics, physiology, decompression theory, the aquatic environment and diving equipment. The curriculum is offered through SSI as a dry course and there are many different options for taking this course as you can either:
- complete it online from the comfort of your own home
- signup for eLearning + a virtual classroom session with one of our SSI Instructors
- take the course in-person while onsite and combine it with other courses or guided dives
Full details on the SSI Science of Diving Course can be found here.
3. Start Diving with Nitrox (if you aren’t already)
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – the Nitrox certification is one of the most useful certifications in diving. So much so that it also made our list of recommendations for before you start your Advanced Course. With this certification, divers are able to dive with a higher concentration (up to 40%) of oxygen than standard air tanks. Benefits include:
- Longer bottom times. Diving with Nitrox means you absorb less nitrogen which allows you to stay underwater longer as it lengthens your no-decompression limits.
- Longer repetitive dive times. If undertaking multiple dives in a day, you’ll have a longer allowable bottom time on subsequent dives than if you were using air.
- Shorter surface intervals. Breathing less nitrogen shortens the required “off-gas” time needed between dives which means you can get back in the water quicker.
- Less fatigue. This last point is up for debate but many divers swear diving on nitrox makes them less tired than diving on air.
The Enriched Air Nitrox course is a dry course and with the eLearning completed ahead of time, divers can take it alongside their guided dives or in combination with other dive courses – so no need to sacrifice time underwater.
4. Learn More About the Marine Environment
With your more advanced skill set, you’ll find yourself becoming more comfortable and confident underwater. This results in less thinking as your buoyancy, propulsion techniques, and movements start to go into autopilot. When these skills click, this is when divers truly start to see the marine world around them. You’ll start noticing things you’ve never noticed before like partner shrimps building their burrows under the protection of gobies, anemone fish tending to their eggs, or groupers helping octopuses and morays hunt.
Now is a great time to deepen your understanding of the behaviors and symbiosis of these marine communities. This can be via an SSI Reef course such as Shark Ecology, Nudibranch Ecology, or Invertebrate Ecology. Or through non-certification programs like our marine education dives which were designed around our local dive sites and marine species.
Advanced Open Water Diver with 40 – 100 Dives
1. Challenge Yourself By Diving More Advanced Dive Sites
You’ve built up a fair bit of experience at this point. It’s time to explore more dive sites slightly outside your comfort zone. Start small with an easy site marked by a tricky entrance or exit. Or visit a site known for stronger – but not too strong – currents. Dive a challenging shipwreck such as the famous Thistlegorm or dive in an area frequented by sharks. This is also a good time to try out a mini-safari. 2 to 3 day dive safari boats can be found around the world and help to prepare you for a future full blown liveaboard diving trip.
2. Take One (Recreational) Step Deeper
If you notice a trend of mostly 30m dives in your dive log, it’s likely a sign you enjoy the deeper end of recreational diving. If this is the case, consider extending your limits to 40m with the Deep Diver Specialty. This unlocks a variety of dive sites and profiles around the world and gives a taste for what lies deeper. It may even lead to your first initial spark of tech diving interest. The underwater world of exploration is limitless!
3. Try a New Gear Configuration with DIR Diving
4. Become a Better Dive Buddy with the Diver Stress and Rescue Courses
Divers of this experience level with 40 – 100 dives often gain enough confidence in their own abilities to start thinking about how they can use that confidence to help other divers. The Rescue course allows you to become familiar with rescue practices both in and out of the water and shows you how to effectively perform and assist in different emergency dive situations. You will walk away from the course knowing how to manage dive accidents, properly fill in required paperwork after a diving incident, and put to use CPR and first aid skills.
5. Delve Deeper into the Science of Diving, Marine Education, and Diving with Nitrox
All of these points were outlined in detail in the first section of recommendations for AOW divers with less than 40 dives. But they also apply here and in the next section as there’s no bad time in your dive journey to consider these options.
Advanced Open Water Diver with 100+ Dives
1. Take to the High Seas on a Diving Liveaboard
Now is the perfect time to take your guided dives to the next level and experience a true diving holiday aboard a vessel designed specifically for divers to do nothing but dive, dive, dive – and then dive some more. There are a host of liveaboard options all over the world – some for 7 nights and some for up to 2 weeks – that are able to reach sites further afield that aren’t easily accessible without overnight stays on the high seas. Divers will also be exposed to a plethora of different – and often challenging – dive environments.
Psssssst shameless self-plug here, but did you know we have our own liveaboard boat based in Hurghada?
2. Join Citizen Science Programs to Aid in Marine Conservation
Citizen Science is a collaborative approach to scientific research that gives non-experts the tools to contribute to local conservation efforts. This often involves engaging with the local community and helping in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. Many coastal areas of Florida and the Caribbean have coral restoration programs where volunteer divers help out in their coral nurseries. The Maldives have shark and manta protection programs while many places in Southeast Asia run cleanup initiatives to remove marine debris.
Locally in Dahab we have Fish Surveying programs to help monitor fish population trends as well as the Reef Check program which monitors corals, fish, and invertebrates. We also host free weekly cleanup dives and are home to Ghost Diving Egypt which removes harmful ghost nets from the region.
Citizen Science programs are a great way to give back to the sea and require experienced AOW divers who are comfortable in the water and exhibit great buoyancy control and situational awareness.
3. Take an Intro to Tec Course – Even if you have Zero Interest in Technical Diving
The Intro to Tec course serves as more than just, well, an intro to technical diving. It expands on recreational training and improves your dive planning methods, in-water skills (especially when it comes to fin kicks and propulsion techniques), and streamlines existing gear configurations.
It also introduces you to the double tank setup (though you also can do this course on a singe tank) which is useful if you are thinking of exploring Technical Diving and have Tec goals in mind. But diving on doubles is also fun for recreational divers who don’t have in interest in going beyond rec depth limits.
Diving on a twinset allows for longer explorations and dives ranging from 60 – 120 minutes. It unlocks a host of dive site options with further distances and there’s a whole community of non-deco doubles divers who love exploring shallow reefs reef systems. We even offer dedicated doubles guided dive options for those looking for non-deco rec twinset dives.
There are a few options to learn how to dive on doubles and when it comes to Intro to Tec courses. Which one is right for you depends on your future dive goals and we suggest looking into:
- TDI Intro to Tec / SSI Extended Range Foundations: both federations offer great 2-day programs to enhance your advanced diving skills in a workshop environment and introduce tec diving gear while building upon your basic skill set to master buoyancy, trim, finning techniques, positioning, and communication.
- GUE Doubles Primer: a one-day course for divers wishing to extend their dive time, prepare for technical training or even increase gas redundancy while diving. It also serves as a great introduction to the highly regarded GUE federation and is good for those interested to see what GUE is all about
- GUE Fundamentals Course: a full 4-day course that functions as a gateway into GUE training. Some divers use the Fundamentals course as a way to improve on the less-than-optimal training they have received during traditional fast-track entry-level courses. Others see the course as a ticket to participate in GUE projects and activities. Many divers and even experienced instructors from other organizations use the course to improve basic skills and gain access to GUE’s cave and tech-training.
In Conclusion
Believe it or not, there are other options not included in the above (here’s looking at you Sidemount diving). But based on our extensive experience as a training facility in all levels of Rec, Tec, and CCR diving – we believe the above provides a good overview of logical options to get you started.
Have any questions or coming to Dahab and want to explore some of these options, feel free to drop us an email – we’re always here to give diving advice and share our expertise!