Advanced Open Water Diver
Take your diving beyond the basics and start diving with real confidence. The Advanced Open Water Diver course helps you build experience, improve buoyancy and navigation skills, and explore exciting types of diving like deep, wreck, night, and drysuit diving. After five adventure dives, you'll feel more comfortable underwater, become a safer diver, and unlock new dive opportunities around the world.
Availability: Contact us for booking information
What do I need to start?
- Open Water Diver certification
- Minimum age: 15 years old (12 for Junior Advanced Open Water Diver)
- A sense of adventure and a desire to continue exploring the underwater world
What is the Advanced Open Water course really about?
The Advanced Open Water Diver course is designed to help you become a more capable, comfortable, and confident diver through real diving experience. Contrary to what the name suggests, this course is not only for “advanced” divers — it is the natural next step after Open Water certification.
Instead of spending time in a classroom, you’ll learn by diving. During the course, you’ll complete five Adventure Dives with your instructor while exploring different types of diving and building practical underwater skills.
You’ll improve your buoyancy, awareness, air consumption, navigation, comfort in varying conditions, and overall confidence underwater. Most divers finish the course feeling dramatically more relaxed and capable in the water.
What dives will I complete?
Your course includes five Adventure Dives, including:
- Deep Adventure Dive
- Underwater Navigation Adventure Dive
- Three additional Adventure Dives chosen based on conditions, student interests, and instructor recommendations
Additional Adventure Dive options may include:
- Peak Performance Buoyancy
- Night Diver
- Wreck Diver
- Drysuit Diver
- Search and Recovery
- Boat Diver
- Drift Diver
- Underwater Photography
- Underwater Videography
- Fish Identification
- Altitude Diver
- Diver Propulsion Vehicle
- Multilevel Diver
- Underwater Naturalist
At London Scuba Centre, our Advanced Open Water courses in Canada commonly focus on dives that build real-world confidence and local diving skills. Depending on conditions and instructor recommendations, students often complete the following Adventure Dives - all extremely valuable skills for Ontario and cold-water diving.
- Peak Performance Buoyancy
- Navigation
- Deep
- Search and Recovery
- Wreck
Why take Advanced Open Water soon after certification?
The best time to continue your training is shortly after completing your Open Water course while your skills are still fresh. Divers who continue diving and training early usually build confidence much faster and become significantly more comfortable underwater.
Advanced Open Water also opens the door to deeper dives, more challenging dive sites, local Ontario diving, tropical wreck diving, and future specialty or rescue training.
How long will it take?
- Minimum training requirement: five dives over two days
- Online learning completed before the dives
What equipment will I need?
- Advanced Open Water eLearning completed
- Logbook
- Required personal safety items (SMB, compass, slate)
- Full scuba equipment (rental equipment available)
Where can I go from here?
After Advanced Open Water, many divers continue into:
- Rescue Diver
- Deep Diver Specialty
- Wreck Diver Specialty
- Night Diver Specialty
- Drysuit Diver Specialty
- Enriched Air (Nitrox)
- Local Ontario wreck diving and dive travel
Many of the Adventure Dives completed during this course may also count toward future specialty certifications.
