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Managed to regular old Scuba certification in 3 hours despite having roughly zero experience.
I was on vacation with a buddy of mine who has a fair number of military dive certifications and has had to do a bunch of blind dives and stuff but he never got his PADI certification. He went to see what he could do and their short answer was 'nothing'.
He explained to the surferbro at the resort's PADI center everything he'd done and threw out enough terminology/lingo to convince him that he knew what he was talking about. So surfbro made us a deal - if we could come back after lunch, take the tests and pass, then get in the pool that afternoon and pass the skills tests, he'd let us skip the course work, short-cut the pool work and head out the following morning to do the major skills. He handed us the course book and away we went to cram for 2 hours. I understand why he let my buddy do it but I didn't know ANYTHING beyond snorkling. I got in by association (and wisely keeping my mouth shut). Fortunately, I am no stranger to power-studying for exams.
Grabbed a few Dos Equis, crammed like crazy, passed the written. I did everything I needed to do in the pool from 2-4, we did our 1 bottle dive and skills tests in the ocean the next morning and that afternoon did a couple of 2 bottle dives as 'Scuba certified'.
Went out the next year and knocked out our open water test in the morning and booked a different charter in the afternoon. All he knew was that we were open water certified at that point so our guide pretty much told us to hop off the boat and meet them back at the flag when we hit 10% on our indicators. It was night and day - "oh, well you guys must not be idiot tourists...have fun".
There's nothing approaching being left the hell alone and getting to dive. When you're out there with the instructors and the groups and stuff it's kinda fun. But that afternoon by ourselves at maybe 30 feet where we couldn't really hurt ourselves, there was no stress, no worry - just a whole lot of ocean to explore. I missed this year's trip so I still have some work to do for AOWD, but I'll get there.
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