Beach Haven

​​ADVANCED OPEN WATER DIVER MANUAL
By Professional Association of Dive Instructors
PADI, 2016, 328 pages
Reviewed by Michael Beach
 
This manual is the text used for divers seeking the advanced certification through PADI. I actually completed this course and certification decades ago as an undergrad. As I have been getting back into diving more recently I got a more modern copy of the latest manual to reacquaint myself.
 
The document assumes the reader already has some basic knowledge of SCUBA since this is a follow on certification after the standard open water program. The course and manual is intended to give some basic information about some of the specialty areas of diving. Each chapter is focused on a different specialty such as deep diving, night diving, wreck diving, and the like. Aside from adding competence to the diver seeking advancement, I think the manual is also designed to encourage even additional certification. Each of the specialty areas has its own certification program.
 
For all the reasons above, if a person has completed the basic open water course it would be wise for continued experience through the advanced class and manual. The more competent the diver, the more comfortable the diver, the more safe the diver.

​AWARE - OUR WORLD, OUR WATER
By a large number of contributors
Project AWARE Foundation, 2009, 115 pages
​Reviewed by Michael Beach

This work is used as a manual for two PADI certification courses I took last year. PADI is the Professional Association of Dive Instructors. I've been a professional member of PADI since 1987 when I completed my Divemaster certification. One certification this book is used for is called Project AWARE Specialist. The other is AWARE Coral Reef Conservation. 

The book walks begins with a more academic look at fresh and salt water systems in general. Then it moves to coral reef systems specifically. After that there is an explanation of all the ways the world aquatic resources are being damaged and the effects. Finally there is a review of what the diving community has been doing, and what individual divers can do to help make things better.

Regardless where a person stands on topics such as global climate change, or how humans and nature should interact, there is some good food for thought in this manual. I'm certainly not some radical environmentalist, but I have been taught my whole live to be conservation minded. From my earliest days I have been out in nature and have enjoyed wild places. I do agree with the sentiment of "think global, and act local." Diving in particular has brought me in contact with some amazing life as recent as just two months ago. On that occasion I was able to make two dives just off of the island of St. Thomas in the USVI. To me, if a person wants to see how masterful an artist God is, they need only to enter those sorts of environment and experience it directly, personally.

Here is a related thought from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). It's called the outdoor code.

As an American, I will do my best to –
Be clean in my outdoor manners.
Be careful with fire.
Be considerate in the outdoors.
Be conservation minded.
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