If you’re a certified scuba diver who's looking for more adventure and excitement, the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course was made for you. The Advanced Open Water Diver course was designed to improve your diving skills through specialized experiences that will open new doors for adventure down the road. For instance, if you’d like to dive a little deeper, try your hand at photography or venture inside shipwrecks, this training is what you need.

So what do you learn in the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course? Well, here’s a breakdown:

Benefits of the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course

The Advanced Open Water Diver course will teach you how to safely dive deeper — from 60 to 130 feet (or 18 to 30 meters) — while developing the skills needed for different types of underwater exploration. And the best part? Since you’re already certified, there’s very little classwork and no written exams, so you get to learn by doing.

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Prerequisites for the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course

You must have a PADI Open Water Diver certification or Junior Open Water Diver certification and be at least 12 years old, although younger participants may not be able to partake in the full menu of Adventure Dives.

What you’ll learn in the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course

That’s the beauty of this course: What you learn is completely up to you. Each diver must complete five Adventure Dives — Deep and Underwater Navigation dives are required and the remaining three options are left up to you. With the two required dives, you’ll learn how to deal with the challenges that arise with deep diving and hone your underwater navigation skills.

Options for your remaining Adventure Dives include:

• Drift • Fish Identification • Digital Underwater Imaging • Wreck • Night • Altitude

Plus many other options, based on your instructor’s availability.

From a PADI Expert

"Once you start diving, it doesn’t take long before you want to do more than swim around looking at fish. The PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course introduces you to popular special activities and options. Want to try a dry suit? You can do that. Maybe learn about underwater snapshots or video? That’s there, too.

"But the Advanced Open Water Diver course has broader value to growing in diving. It ups your underwater navigation skills and introduces some deeper diving — both great skills — but more to the point, you learn more about thinking like an experienced diver. Stuff like next-level gas management, situational awareness and knowing what to do first when everything seems to be happening at once.

"Sometimes, new divers tell me, 'I just got certified. I just want to go diving.' That’s understandable, but the Advanced Open Water Diver course is diving, and designed so Open Water Divers can go straight into it. Think, 'I just got certified. I can go diving like I want to, and have a blast becoming a better diver guided by my PADI Instructor at the same time.'"

– Karl Shreeves, PADI Technical Development Executive