Strictly speaking, to dive beyond you metres you must complete the PADI Advanced course or an equivalent course with another organisation. Having said that, many dive centres will allow you to go slightly beyond that limit in the course of your diving, if the conditions dictate. If the dive centres are willing to take you deeper, is a formal course required?

The answer is simply yes. If you are diving abroad on relevant holiday insurance, it will probably only cover you as far as your training qualifies you. Have an accident and discover your computer is reading a maximum depth of 20 metres with only Open Water certification and you have just given your insurer an excuse to not pay out. This could leave you footing the bills for your medical treatment. For this reason, the better dive centres will also stop you from entering the water for a deeper dive if you are under qualified.

So what is involved on the Advanced Open Water course? This course, unlike nearly all of the rest of the PADI courses, is purely a diving course. No multi choice exam papers at the end of this, just do the diving and you have completed the course. So there are just 5 taster dives to complete.

The 5 dives are each the first dives from the various speciality courses that PADI have on offer. You can choose any three that you want from all that are available at the dive centre where you are doing the training. Add to these two the compulsory elements of a deep dive and a navigation dive and you are a PADI Advanced diver.

It is that simple and you could complete the optional three and the navigation element by completing specialities before the course. But most centres will not allow you on the deep diver training course without first completing the advanced course. Most of the speciality courses comprise of two or three dives with some classroom work and an exam. When completing the taster for the Advanced course, you will do the first dive of your chosen courses with enough classroom work, probably informally, to get the most out of the course.

I started my course with the navigation dive. Performed in shallow water, we navigated around a bay performing a variety of exercises and enjoying the dive. It was a gentle introduction back into the water after eight weeks away.

Then came what is no doubt the main dive of the course. The deep dive. We headed out across the surface of the same bay another day and then dropped into the water, steadily increasing our depth as we swam to a drop off. This became a challenge of buoyancy as much as anything as we eventually swam over the ledge, with nothing but deep ocean below, and dropped to almost 30 metres to admire some pink coral, before returning slowly back to the surface.

The other dives were just chosen to pick interesting dives out of what the centre had on offer at the time. On each I would discuss with my instructor the dive, what we had to be aware of and then complete the dive. It was a great way to gain a lot of experience in a short time for someone who had not completed much diving.

Of course, a lot of this depends on how good the staff are at the training location that you choose to learn at and the dives that they have on offer. Make sure that you read some dive centre reviews before you travel to select a good place to dive with, after all it is not cheap and you want to make sure that you are in safe hands.

Some of the courses may entail the use of specialist diving equipment, some of which you might want to buy for yourself before you travel. For example if you are keen at photography, taking your own camera and being taught the best way of using that is better than using the centre's own cameras.