NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver

Prerequisites:

• Qualifications: entry level diving qualification from any agency (including NAUI, PADI, BSAC, CMAS, SAA, SSAC, etc.)
• Experience level: none
• Minimum age: 12
• Diving medical: self assessment acceptable

Equipment:

• If you own your personal diving equipment, it's best to take the course using this. If not, Mavericks Diving will loan you all that you need, except for a prescription face mask.
• You will need your own bathing costume and a towel.

Duration:

• two days

Dates & availabilty:

• on request

The NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course comprises six dives. Three are core dives. One is designed to introduce you to the skills needed to attain greater independence by showing you more advanced underwater navigation techniques. Another opens new scuba possibilities by introducing you to night diving. The third core dive brings you into the realms of deeper scuba diving under the direct supervision of a NAUI Worldwide instructor. The additional three elective dives will build your underwater hours and let you get a taste of some fun and intriguing scuba pursuits. These could include wreck diving, marine life surveying, search and recovery and underwater photography.

Navigation

Especially when diving independently of professional leadership, it is essential to have a sense of where you are under the water. Without a sense of direction you won't be able to find your way underwater to points of interest like a small reef or part of a wreck. Eventually you'll also need to return to your boat or find your way back to shore. You also need to develop a feel for how long it will take to get to and from these points of interest in order to ensure you always have enough air to safely complete your dive.

During learn to scuba dive courses only very basic compass navigation skills are taught. These usually teach you to do little more than how to swim out in a straight line, turn around and come back to where you started from. Your NAUI Advanced Scuba course will teach you the underwater navigation techniques that will enable you to plan more advanced dives. These will let you range farther and see more on each dive. You'll learn pilotage - using natural underwater features such as sand ripples to navigate by - as well as more advanced compass work including swimming squares and triangles. During your practice swims you'll begin to get a handle on estimating distance. By combining pilotage and compass techniques, you'll quickly learn the accurate navigation methods that will really enhance your diving enjoyment.

Night Diving

Night diving is one of the most exciting aspects of our sport. As the day shift gives over to the night shift, the marine ecosystem changes before your eyes. The total contrast between day and night diving means that familiar dive sites assume a completely new character and a renewed interest, even for old hands. At night colours are much more vibrant under the sweep of your lamps, many fish are much easier to get close to (some will be sleeping) while other animals, like octopus, are out hunting. Night diving is also an aspect of scuba diving that you can enjoy with little additional equipment, minimal extra training or experience and is regularly offered by most resorts and liveaboards. And, of course, by diving through the hours of darkness you can enjoy more dives in a trip or space your dives out to suit your preference. The NAUI Advanced Scuba course from Mavericks Diving London includes a night dive. You'll learn about night diving kit including dive lights, personal markers and shore beacons alongside night diving skills development including signalling and problem management.

Deep Diving

Entry level dive courses typically limit basic divers to a maximum depth of 18 metres. Often, it's just not deep enough. While diving deep for the sake of it isn't smart, being able to operate in the 18 to 40 metre range opens up many more diving experiences to you. Many shipwrecks, for example, are found in deeper waters where they can survive storms and won't be dispersed by the authorities to prevent them from becoming a maritime hazard. Many corals thrive best at depth and some species of sharks avoid the shallows. Some exceptional diving experiences will be lost to you if you have to remain only in the top 18 metres.

Deep diving should not be undertaken lightly, whatever the rewards. Diving deep can add to buoyancy control problems, increases air consumption while decreasing no decompression times and adds in a greater nitrogen narcosis factor. During your NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course with Mavericks Diving London you'll learn more about these factors and how to manage the additional risks involved in deeper diving. You'll be closely supervised during your deep dive and will complete several exercises at depth to increase your understanding of the effects of diving in the deeper zones.

Electives - your choice of dives!

Navigation, night and deep diving are key parts of your NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course. They help you gain important knowledge and skills you'll use in everyday diving activities. An additional three dives are included to increase your time under the water - an essential step towards building your experience for which there aren't really any short cuts. These three dives are also designed to give you a taste of some of scuba diving's multitude of special interest activities. One of the great things about scuba diving is that there are so many different and rewarding aspects to it. It isn't a single activity Mavericks Diving London offers you a choice of elective dives, so you can select the specialty taster dives that most interest you. Mavericks Diving's strict policy of only working with very small student groups means that we can normally work around you to provide the diving activities you'd like to try most. Choices include:

Underwater Digital Photography

Underwater photography is one of the fastest growing special interest areas in scuba diving. It's thrilling to be behind the camera to shoot your own picture record of your diving adventures. And great to have shots to show your friends and family. With the advent of digital compact underwater cameras, underwater photography has become extremely easy and surprisingly low cost.

Mavericks Diving London is owned by Ocean Optics who have specialised in supplying underwater photographers with their camera equipment for thirty years. Steve Warren (owner of Ocean Optics and Mavericks Diving London) and Andrew Pugsley (our director of training) are keen underwater photographers whose images have appeared in a number of publications. Andrew and Steve will guide you through the basics of shooting quality underwater photographs using Fuji underwater cameras equipped with Inon lenses.

This dive serves as an introduction to underwater photography. It's backed by some basic theory, a look at some straightforward techniques to get you get super images from your photo dive and some pointers on dive safety that would-be underwater photographers need to consider. Steve and Andrew will set you some subjects to capture on camera and will then debrief you on your results. We think you'll be surprised at how good your first underwater photographs will be. If you become hooked, a self contained NAUI Worldwide/Mavericks Diving London underwater photography course will introduce you to using Inon underwater flashguns for more controlled lighting and additional techniques to let you shoot a much wider range of subjects. Mavericks Diving London and Ocean Optics host many underwater photography events each year, including the premier event of the British calendar, the Visions in the Sea underwater photography festival. At Visions in the Sea you'll see world-class underwater image makers sharing their hard won information with you to help you improve. There's nothing else like it for keen underwater photographers in the UK.

Search and Recovery

Search and recovery diving is one of scuba diving's more challenging activities. Search and recovery diving skills may be called upon to search for known losses. Often these will be personal items of diving equipment lost accidentally at your dive location. These might be small high value personal effects including dive computers, scuba watches, underwater cameras and, of course, designer sunglasses. Or your car keys. Sometimes much larger items of equipment end up on the seafloor by accident. Outboard engines are a good example. Othertimes you may want to simply make a speculative dive to see what you may find. What was once junk centuries ago and was unceremoniously thrown overboard or flung off bridges has now become highly collectible. Many divers search out bottles, inkwells, smoking pipes and other bric-a-brac for display pieces.

The NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course can show you some of the search and recovery techniques used by professional salvors to find both small and large objects underwater. You'll learn search skills using dive reels for making precise fingertip searches for small items as well as learn compass search patterns for finding larger equipment. These search skills are also very important to rescue divers who may need to quickly locate a missing diver.

Finding the object is only part of the dive. While small items of lost kit are easily recovered, large and heavy equipment, like engines, require the use of lift bags. Your NAUI Worldwide Advanced Scuba course from Mavericks Diving London will teach you the lifting bag control skills needed to bring these objects back from the deep.

If you enjoy search and recovery diving, then NAUI Worldwide offers a complete search and recovery course that will let you learn and practice many more skills.

Wreck Diving

Wreck diving is a fascinating diving specialisation. Divers worldwide explore not just shipwrecks, but submarines, aircraft and even locomotives. Conflicts, collisions, scuttling and storms have sent all types of wreckage to the seabed. Wreck diving is also a mainstay of british diving. Some divers explore wrecks as time capsules, a link to the past that intrigues them. Others enjoy diving on wrecks to observe marine life - wrecks soon become busy ecosystems in their own right. Photographers find shipwrecks amongst the most evocative of underwater subjects. Wreck diving offers something for everyone.

To get the most reward from diving on wrecks, it helps to have some background knowledge and certain diving skills. With this training you'll find it much easier to navigate your way around shipwrecks and recognise areas that will yield the most reward. Many wrecks lie beyond the NAUI Scuba Diver 18 metre zone, so the deep diver introduction you receive on this NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course will be especially useful to you if wrecks are a strong interest. A NAUI Worldwide Deep Diving course compliments the NAUI Worldwide Wreck Diver course perfectly.

If you do become captivated by wreck diving, additional formal wreck diver training will prove invaluable. These courses build on what you have already learned and add important further skills including how to enter wrecks safely. A NAUI Worldwide Wreck Diver course is a valuable and interesting diving program, which will make your wreck diving much more rewarding.

Marine Life Observation and Data Collection

It's marine life that draws most people to diving. The underwater realm is certainly a unique one. It's remarkable how quickly humans are accepted by most marine animals. This naturalist dive from NAUI Worldwide's Advanced Scuba Diver course will explain about some of the local marine life and how to find it. You'll be set a task to find and survey some specific species, noting your results using underwater slates. Your Mavericks Diving scuba instructor will talk to you about different species and how to find them at the dive site. You'll be looking for corals and sponges, invertebrates like nudibranchs and various fish species including shoaling fish you can see in midwater and those less easy to find that hide under sand or blend with the rocks. This naturalist dive will help you to get your eye in for finding animals in their local habitat. Any diving location that Mavericks Diving London visits will have lots of underwater life. Our connections means that if this specialty underwater naturalist dive hooks you, we can offer you something special to really boost your understanding of the underwater world. During 2008 Mavericks Diving London will be offering a special marine biology course for divers. This course will be split into two parts. The first will be a series of evening presentations that will explain the science of marine biology at lay level. The optional second part will be a field trip overseas to put what you've learned into practice. On this diving holiday you'll enjoy some fantastic diving. Mavericks Diving London has engaged a professional marine biologist to teach this very special workshop.

Summary

The NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course from Mavericks Diving London will provide you with key skills you'll come to depend upon in your recreational diving career, gets you more time underwater to build your hours and introduces you to some fascinating diving activities. Expect to have a lot of fun! The NAUI Advanced Scuba Diver course usually takes a weekend.

To book this course we recommend you get in touch by phone, e-mail, or by dropping into the shop to discuss the requirements. If you've already done that, you can download the booking form (editable pdf).