Scuba Diving Specialties, Which are worth doing after Your Open Water _ 50ft Below.

So you just finished your open water course and you got your certification in the bag. A world of options in scuba diving specialties lays in front of you. But which one is the right one to pick? We are here to help, so let's dive in. Welcome to 50ftbelow where we give you some straight up scuba advice. My name is Arjan. All agencies have a wide array of specialty topics and most of them also have dedicated specialties for certain areas like Turtle Diver, Treasure Shark Diver, Ark's Bill, Clam Diver. I'm not really sure that one exists but you got the point. Those specialties may be fun to do but in the first instance they don't make you a better diver. So when you just start out we would suggest you pick specialties which will make you a better diver instantly. Also a little side note, an advanced course where you do one lesson of each specialty is in our opinion not really a way forward. This is just too little training to mean anything. It's better to do specialties after your open water certification and go for an advanced certification later on. Advanced in my opinion, our opinion is just a way to make money. In our opinion the best specialty to start with is a perfect buoyancy specialty or a buoyancy specialty because this will be the base on which your diving skills will be built on. Every dive you do after your buoyancy specialty and you can use the skills you will learn during this specialty. Everything is also harder when your buoyancy isn't in check. It's harder to photograph underwater, it's harder to do a drift dive when you don't have your buoyancy. So you need to get this right from the get-go and then you can do other stuff. If you need some additional tips on buoyancy we've made a separate video on it and you can find it right here. After you finish your perfect buoyancy specialty we would recommend to do a navigational specialty. Even if you only do guided dives this is a skill worth having. For instance what do you do when you lose your group? It would be nice if you can find a boat on your own. Also if you have done the navigational specialty and you have got your navigational skills in the pocket then this will open up a broad spectrum of other dive sites like shore diving and maybe some local diving which you can do without a guide. After you've done these two specialties you have got some solid foundation to get some experience. Stop doing specialties for a while, just go and dive a lot and gain some experience. This will help you prep for ongoing more demanding specialties and it's also fun to just go diving without doing something new and gain some experience. Once you get a bit more experience then it's time to enlarge your horizon and seek additional training. Any of these specialties are good and it depends hugely on where you live and what your local diving is like and what the type of diving is you want to do. The specialties we've picked are night diving, deep diving, enriched air diving and dry suit diving. These are all specialties which add onto your diving skills and are really worth doing. Beware when you pick a diving operation for your specialty. A specialty in operation dive operation one isn't the same as in operation two so be sure you get a quality course for your money because it varies widely. Ask any diver who has done a few specialties on different locations and they will tell you the same. Another thing you need to be aware of is that some dive operations use specialties to make money. They go on a wreck dive where they only dive around the wreck but they say a wreck diving specialty is mandatory. Of course they make the rules that's fine but they make you do the specialty which is a total joke. They get you in the water, you need to identify the wreck which means you point at it, you identify the ascent line, point at it and voila you've got yourself a specialty. I don't need to tell you this isn't really a specialty. In my opinion a specialty is best done at a familiar diving operation with a familiar instructor. This is usually locally. If you want to do it abroad make sure you do your homework and end up with it. School by school.