Maximize Your Holiday Time: Start Your PADI Open Water Diver Course ONLINE!

While there are many advantages to learning to dive in Pattaya – the warm water, the low prices, the ease of having everything arranged for you from hotel pickup to lunch and your return – there’s one downside for many holiday makers: Time, or rather the lack of it.

Many people come to Pattaya for a week or less and therefore don’t want to spend all of their time doing something “serious” like learning to dive. Sure, they want to dive – get out in the water, see the fish, enjoy themselves, etc – but they don’t want to do the not-so-fun stuff, like sit in a classroom for eight hours and take exams.

We agree. It’s not a great use of your holiday time but until this week there was really only one way around that: You could do your theory and even swimming pool work in your home country and then do the four required dives here. We call it the Open Water Diver Referral Course and it’s pretty common.

This week, however, PADI gave you (and us) another option, and it’s a good one: The PADI Open Water Diver Course ONLINE. Yes, now you can do your theory and exams over the Internet thanks to PADI’s new eLearning initiative.

Well, actually, PADI eLearning is not new. Last year PADI tried to offer two courses – Discover Nitrox and Scuba Review – online but it was, by PADI’’s own admission, a failure. Rather than press on and try to fix it, PADI went back to the drawing board and came up with the Open Water Online course. We think it’s a winner.

Now you no longer have to “waste” a day and a half of your precious holiday time sitting in the Aquanauts classroom. Simply click on the eLearning promotional button on the AquanautsDive.com homepage and you’ll go to the Aquanauts eLearning main page. Click the “Start Here” button and a window will pop up (yes, even with your popup blocker on) that allows you to read more about the specifics of the Open Water Online course, register an account, pay for the training and get started.

The price is set by PADI at US$120. This covers all your academic work, unit quizzes and final exam. You’ll work through each presentation at your own pace, stopping and saving when you want to. You also get unlimited access – even after the course – to the Open Water Diver Manual Online Edition. To continue, simply come back to the Aquanauts website and click the “Login” button.

When you finish all the units, you can then print out your training record. Bring that with you to Aquanauts when you come to town and we’ll arrange the final three days of your course. (This could be compressed into two days if time is really short.) The price for the in-water training with us is 10,000 Thai Baht.

First you’ll do a short review quiz, just to be sure it was you who completed the online portion and that you understood everything. Then you’ll do a half-day session in the swimming pool, practicing those skills you learned about online.

The next two days will have you on the Aquanauts boat, doing your four Open Water dives. If you are doing the compressed course, you’ll do the swimming pool skills and Open Water Dive 1 on the first day on the boat and then dives 2-4 the next day.

Alternatively, you can choose to upgrade your course to the PADI National Geographic Open Water Diver course, a much-better deluxe version of the standard Open Water course. You’ll have to read the 60-page National Geographic Diver Almanac (most of which is photos), watch the National Geographic Diver DVD and complete two pages of knowledge reviews, but in return for the extra work you get more skills training in the ocean, more knowledge about your environment and, best of all, an extra day diving, including a free fun dive.

So, the bottom line is now you can learn to dive and maximize your holiday time in Pattaya! Take the PADI Open Water Diver Online course, knock out the fundamentals at home at your own pace and then hit the water right away in Pattaya!