According to the PADI course advancement schedule, a diver who has completed the OWD Course would then move on to do ‘Adventure Dives’. Examples of Adventure Dives are Deep Diving, Dry Suit Diving, Multilevel and Computer Diving, Night Diving, and Underwater Photography, just to name a few.
When a diver accumulates more than 5 adventure dives, 2 of which must be the Deep Diving and Underwater Navigator Adventure Dives, he/she earns the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver certification, and receives a new license card accordingly.
We structured our Advanced Open Water Diver Course to accomplish five selected Adventure dives within one weekend trip. While there are 16 Adventure Dive sections in the PADI Adventures in Diving Manual, you will only need to complete five.
On the 3D2N trip to the dive location of your choice, you will get to make new friends; both human and sea-dwellers. Upon passing the requirements of the Advanced Open Water Diver Course, you will earn your PADI Advanced Open Water Diver Card, proof of your mastery of techniques and skills crucial to safe and enjoyable diving in a multitude of scenarios and special environments.
Learn about your five adventure dives in the comfort of your own home and time!
Deep Diving
Talk to people about a “deep dive” and watch them react. New certified divers want to know what it is like, and divers who are more experienced and who have ventured deeper start to share about their adventures with a twinkle in the eye.
Deep diving presents certain special challenges that commands a fair bit of respect. Going deeper is exciting, adventurous, and mysterious. The surface falls far away overhead, the increasing darkness and coldness in depths, the feel of air getting denser and thicker, the environment presenting ever-odder organisms and dwellers of the deep is simply exhilarating.
New PADI Open Water Divers are limited to a depth of 18m, which is the maximum depth which they are qualified to dive. This is not a number chosen for fun- it is a careful decision based on non-decompression limits, nitrogen narcosis at depths, and air supply on the standard 11L aluminium tank at 232 bar pressure. Even for beginner divers who have tried a few dives, they quickly become curious on attempting deeper dives and breaking their own personal limits.
Certain dive sites have the best attractions at depths greater than 18m. Take the Similan Islands in Phuket, Thailand for example (we organise liveonboard trips there between the months of Oct-February). With excellent visibility of about 30m, one of the world’s most famous dive sites, Richelieu Rock harbours the rare and exquisite ghost pipefish and leopard sharks at a depth of 30-32 metres.
Off the coast of Kuantan, Malaysia, the wrecks of WW2 British battleships the Prince of Wales and the Repulse rest in deep water, with part of the hull poking about 29 metres or so. In Layang Layang, Malaysia, divers wait in waters about 25 metres deep early in the morning for the huge groups of hammerhead shark silhouettes to appear above them.
Having experience in deep diving as a component of the AOWD course is important in essential in unlocking the deep treasures of the sea. For people who ask- which course should I take, if I want to focus on enjoying my leisure dives everywhere around the world? We’ll say, take the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver-Deep Dive core module.
In the Deep Diving chapter, we examine special activities during Deep Dives and also the idea of setting objectives for safety reasons. We define limits and guide you on how to set personal limits; and bring you through the special equipment required for deep diving, and modifications to ‘standard’ equipment in order to suitably prepare for a safe and comfortable deep dive.
We cover techniques useful during the deep dive to counter unique challenges presented by the depths such as managing narcosis, breathing techniques to conserve air supplies, vertigo, reducing silting, and so on.
Deep dives also present new environments such as wall dives, where the reef hangs vertically instead of the common horizontal seabed layout. The chapter covers safety stops and emergency decompression stops. The deeper you go, the more conscious and aware we have to be about the effects of decompression. Hence, we cover decompression illness-and avoiding it- in higher resolution.
If you want to explore Deep Diving further and earn a Deep Diver Specialty certification, the PADI Deep Diver Specialty Course covers:
Recompression Chamber overview
Examining pressure-affected objects at depth
Practicing use of emergency breathing equipment
Recording colour changes at depth
Practicing navigation on deep dives
Drift Diving
Any certified Open Water Diver would tell you that it’s difficult to dive in places where there’s strong currents. In their experience, currents are something to fight against.
A drift diver will say otherwise. Adhering to the philosophy “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, drift diving became the norm in many areas with continuous strong currents.
Drift diving pushes up the adrenaline factor. At sites such as Pulau Lang in Dayang, Malaysia and Crystal Bay in Nusa Penida, Bali, the current whips the diver along faster than one can swim. Some call it like being on a jet plane, horizontal sky diving or hang gliding. When you drift dive, the current works for you instead of against you.
Diving is a unique sport in that it is based on a solid foundation of relevant knowledge which shapes useful techniques for practical applications underwater. Drift diving is similar- a good knowledge of current flow, tidal effects and the drift dive environment allows the drift diver to accurately predict where the boat should wait for the ascending party during the end of the dive, how strong the current will be and how far would a missing buddy drift in that event.
The chapter covers all of those as well as special techniques used in drift diving, modified to help keep the group or dive buddies together, prevent exhaustion, and ‘use the current’.
If you want to explore Drift Diving further and earn a Drift Diver Specialty certification, the PADI Drift Diver Specialty Course covers:
The role of the line-handler
A closer look at the nature of currents
Choosing the ideal drift dive boat
Night Diving
It’s a seemingly strange idea, to step off into an infinite blackness. When the sun goes down, the entire dive environment transforms. Interesting creatures emerge and dominate the night- some even hunt at night, as the usual dwellers of the day find cracks and crevices to hide in and catch a snooze.
Night diving, evidently, is a world of its own. Visiting a familiar dive site at night is like visiting a whole new dive site. Feeling anxious about being underwater in the dark? That’s the fun bit; and there’s a good reason why the night dive is the ‘best dive’ of the Advanced Course for new Advanced divers. It’ll leave you fascinated and raring to go for the next.
Also, dive operators and locations worldwide will require you to at least have night diving experience in an advanced course or be a Night Specialty diver in order to allow you to attempt night diving, so please attempt this adventure dive!
Dayang, Tioman and Phuket undoubtedly offer one of the best Night Diving in the world. We’re certain of it. With a dive torch in hand we observe beautiful lionfish with bright orange-red spines, Spanish dancers, bamboo sharks, crabs and shrimps. You could even turn your torch off and watch as tiny plankton fluoresce and glow in the wake of your fins. It’s an experience like no other.
Night time is also one of the best times for underwater photography- due to the bizarre creatures that emerge, and the dramatic black backdrop which the night presents. Wrecks at night command awe and wonder- when the dive finally ends, it’s often an ascent into a beautiful, starlit night sky.
Night diving requires primarily only one extra piece of equipment: a waterproof dive torch. Dive torches differ in luminosity, softness/harshness of beam, and colour temperature, which will affect your perception of the things you see and photograph underwater.
However it’s not as easy as it seems. In the daytime, the entire underwater terrain is easily observable and it’s fairly easy to make out clumps of coral. It’s also easy to catch the attention of your buddy in the day. In the night time, special techniques help you to communicate with your buddy, maintain awareness of the immediate surroundings, and even safely ascend in the dark.
We cover how to cope with light failures, missing buddies, disorientation, and simple navigation- eventually building your confidence in attempting a successful night dive.
If you want to explore Night Diving further and earn a Night Diver Specialty certification, the PADI Night Diver Specialty Course covers issues studied in your Night Adventure dive in more detail.
Peak Performance Buoyancy
If there is a measure of how ‘good’ a diver is; what separates the upper and lower echelons of proficiency, you’ll almost get the same answer everytime: buoyancy control.
Masters of buoyancy control ascend, stop, hover and descend with hardly a fin kick or the wave of hands. It’s as if they simply think it, and it happens. They glide through the water with very little resistance and it seems effortless for them to gracefully weave in between and under coral and rock columns.
In contrast, those without such control will constantly kick, hands flailing for control. They will adjust their BCDs constantly, and find depth changes difficult. These divers may dive safely and effectively, but not as efficiently as those who have good buoyancy control. They tend to use up air faster, find it harder to manoeuvre in a current, and also damage the underwater environment in uncontrolled bumps and crashes into coral.
Peak performance buoyancy is a skill which is part technique driven and partially about how much experience a diver has. Like seasoned pilots being able to land aircraft smoothly, the more you dive, the better your buoyancy will be if you consciously seek to improve it continuously. It’s a skill which you will use in every dive, under any circumstance.
In a way, most dive instructors will choose Peak Performance Buoyancy as the adventure dive to take, if you could only pick one. It’s truly a skill that takes the rest of your diving adventure to hone and to perfect; and almost everyone you speak to will give you a different tip and trick on how to bring your buoyancy control to the next level.
In the chapter, we start off by evaluating what is your current status of buoyancy control. Let’s be honest; everyone’s a learner, even the instructor who is guiding you along. We learn to estimate the amount of weights needed and a nifty trick on how to perform a basic weight check for proper weighting.
When it comes to fine tuning your buoyancy, even the material of your scuba cylinder and the age of your wetsuit matters! We also go through a variety of techniques to help you maintain your buoyancy and trim, as well as your air consumption as all three ‘performance indicators’ of diving actually go pretty much hand in hand.
If you want to explore Peak Performance Buoyancy further and earn a PPB Specialty certification, the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy Diver Specialty Course specifically pushes the practical aspects of this skill to new heights(or depths) for you. Your Peak Performance Buoyancy Adventure Dive would also count towards this specialty certification.
Underwater Navigation
Remember your first Open Water Dive? It was thrilling, exciting, disorienting. You might be surprised at how your instructor or the divemaster was able to lead you in a swimaround and still bring the group back to the buoy line to continue some of the skills. Your instructor/divemaster knows exactly where you were diving all along!
That is a demonstration of underwater navigation, a fundamental dive skill. As a certified diver, you may dive alone with your buddy in a familiar dive site without a dive guide. In the Singapore context where there is always a divemaster or instructor leading you during the dive, this may not be true overseas. In fact, in some areas, the dive guide conducts a briefing on a chart or a representative underwater map- then off you go to explore the dive site on your own.
The Navigation Dive picks up the rudimentary skills you’ve picked up from your Open Water Diver Course and expands them so that you can use them with greater accuracy and under different circumstances.
In the chapter, we explore a few methods of distance measurement underwater and how to use an underwater compass. We learn about how to navigate patterns, which is useful for a wide variety of applications. Be it search and recovery of wrecks and treasure, you’ll need this skill for evaluating reef health and even for mapping expeditions.
We also explore the techniques of natural navigation; which is the understanding and knowledge of natural patterns, tidal and current movements, position of the sun and stars. Even the shadows can help you to find your way underwater!
Getting lost in a dive can be frustrating; and without a dive guide, you simply can’t afford to lose your way in many dive sites across the world. This is an important skill- in fact, the Navigation Adventure Dive is a compulsory ‘core’ elective required to earn the Advanced Open Water Diver Certification. Since the best dives tend to be accomplished in small groups, knowing how to navigate in a new dive site independently would easily make you the best buddy ever!
If you want to explore the Underwater Navigation Dive further and earn an Underwater Navigator Specialty certification, the PADI Underwater Navigator Specialty Course is for you. This Course gives you more opportunities to apply and practice the skills and techniques with regards to navigation during diving in a variety of situations.
