PADI Open Water Diver
Prerequisites: none
Minimum age: 10
(For divers under the age of 15, please see our note about youth training.)
Time commitment: 20 hours
Price: ~$300 + materials
So you've decided you want to take the plunge? Great! We'd love to introduce you to a new healthy addiction: breathing compressed air underwater!
Don't worry, you're not signing up for a six-month endeavour that will feel like you went back to high-school. Most of the course will be spent underwater getting used to the fact that you're in a situation that most people will never experience!
What is it?
The PADI Open Water Diver certification is a permanent certification that allows you to go diving in similar (or better) conditions to those in which you were trained. That means you will be certified to dive with another certified diver (minimum Open Water Diver) without professional supervision. Your maximum recommended depth is 60'/18m as that is the deepest we will go in the course.
You will need to do some homework with the self-study materials and then we'll go over what you learned and take some quizzes and an exam when we meet. You'll then learn the skills in "confined water," that is, water that is relatively shallow and either in a pool or pool-like. Each skill will be demonstrated one at a time for you, then you get to master it before we go to the next skill. Once we're done with the confined water skills, we'll move on to open water. This next function happens either in a lake or in the ocean! Each dive will be mostly made up of exploration, but you'll also get to do most of the confined water skills over again to demonstrate you've retained those abilities.
What do I need?
For this entry-level class, you need very little. A bathing suit is pretty much the only mandatory piece of equipment! If you have your own wetsuit and you find that it fits well, you can bring it as well, as the pool will sometimes get a little chilly.
You will also need a current copy of the PADI Open Water Diver manual and DVD or eLearning equivalent. We can help you get that if you don't already have it from another source.
Other than that, just bring your smile and sense of adventure!
Sign me up!
I wanna do this! Sign me up for your next Open Water Diver course!
Please let us know if you have any specific ideas on where you'd like to do the open water portion of the training (a nearby lake or ocean) and if you have completed any previous scuba dive training, as these may affect the price. We try to tailor our classes to the student, so this also helps us serve you better.
Earn Credit
The PADI Open Water Diver course is recommended by the American Council on Education (ACE) for one lower-level college recreation/physical education credit. See the list of PADI programmes available for ACE credit, then contact your college or university to enquire as to whether it can apply towards your college education.
This course is also eligible for 2 high school credits for grade 10, 11 & 12 students by the British Columbia Ministry of Education (External Credentials Program for Industrial and Occupational Courses) programme. More information is available on PADI's website.
What's next?
After completing the PADI Open Water Diver course with Simple Scuba, the choices in what to do next are practically endless! A variety of specialty certifications are available, as are the PADI Adventure Diver and Advanced Open Water Diver certifications.
As a lot of diving happens in somewhat remote locations, we also highly recommend first aid training, especially a course in emergency oxygen administration and dive-specific injury treatment.