99: PADI AOW Certified
I’ve finished the PADI Advanced Open Water Dive Course yesterday. It was pretty easy and not too much theory as compared to the Open Water Course. (More hands-on diving)
There were five “Speciality” Dives to do, 3 were mandatory plus two I could choose from a list of options.
Deep Dive, Navigation and Night Dive were mandatory. In addition I chose Peak Performance Buoyancy and Search and Recovery.
Deep Dive took us down to about 30m. Pretty low visibility. Merky water and everything looks very brown/greenish.. not my favourite spot. We did some some excercises there to show the effects of nitrogen narcosis such as tying a few special knots which got a bit more difficult at that depth. I felt quite happy too though I doubt it was nacrosis but rather the fact that it was quite funny how crap I was at doing the knots (which was expected).. Afterwards we played egg-yolk tennis: Crack open an egg and extract egg yolk then use hand to push it to the other divers..
(and protect it from the fish who want to nibble on it;-)
Navigation
This was tricky. We had a compass and had to do a square and a triangle. Buddy work, one looks at direction (compass) other monitors altitude and distance travelled.. We failed miserably coming back to the start point (but blamed it on the current;-)
Night Dive
Wooooaauuw – cool stuff! Pitch black and just a torch an compass to find your way..
Luckily the navigation was just straight line and back plus dive master was mostly leading but swimming in the dark is pretty mad. Especially because you loose sense of depth (how far from bottom) and surroundings easily. Torch works for about 5 meters maybe. Funny to “scan” the water in front of you to find obstacles, fish, etc. We saw a MASSIVE Titan Puffer Fish that night which looked like about 60cm in length. We managed to swim very close to it and could almost touch it. It did not seem to be bothered by us or the light of the torches. (Most other fish just made a very quick exit when they were illuminated)
Peak Performance Buoyancy
Nice one. Trying to control buoyance a bit better. Mainly to float in midwater without moving. Did that vertical, horizontal, upside-down and also on back.. Good practice..
Search and Recovery..
Did soe search patterns to find a “lost” coin on the sea bed. Amazingly we did actually find them.. Also did some lifting us items with a lift bag..
Overall an interesting dive course though a bit short.. I could have done more practical diving to get the hang of things.. But that’s what fund dives are good for as well 🙂
Tags: Koh Tao, RTW 2005/2006, Thailand
saschas
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