PADI Qualified Advanced Divers

Delaying our flight by a couple of days was the best decision we could've made. This allowed us to complete and successfully pass the PADI Advanced Open Water Divers qualification allowing us to dive to a depth of 30m which now opens up 98% of all dive sites across the world!

On the two day advanced course we learnt more theory, in particular about the risks of deep diving, decompression, buoyancy control, air management as well as completing another 5 dives. Each dive had a different focus: deep dive, wreck dive, night dive, peak performance buoyancy skills dive and underwater navigation.

On the first day we completed 3 dives, one of those being the night dive. On the evening of the dive conditions were very rough and windy. The instructors admitted to having never seen waves like it, but receiving the 'okay' from the captain, we ventured out into the rough sea, the boat literally see-sawing over the large waves. As soon as Dan got into the water he was sick due to motion sickness, not ideal on the rough sea and pretty scary to watch feeling so helpless. After a few tough minutes on the surface we submerged under the water and completed the night dive. Slowly, one by one the torches died until only a few were left on, with all remaining torches being extra dim because the previous group forgot to put them on charge before hand - as if the night dive wasn’t spooky enough. As Dan's battery went out, we linked arms to complete the rest of the dive. The feeling was surreal, very eery but an amazing experience seeing two blue-dotted sting rays shining in the dim light and lots of bioluminescent plankton glowing right in front of your eyes as you have your hands. The wreck dive was also great where we saw some rather large fish through window and door openings.

On day two, we completed another two dives focusing on skills. One dive had an underwater playground, where we focused on buoyancy, controlled by breathing, to manoeuvre through all kinds of obstacles such as hoops and frames. Our final dive focusing on underwater navigation led to us seeing two giant pufferfish and a sea turtle. Heading back to the boat and spotting the large sea turtle under a huge undercut of a rock, we were so excited by this our group hung around to observe. This meant Jess’ air was getting low and after signalling this, both Jess and I had to air-share. Jess seems to guzzle air like no one and even our instructors had never come across a female consuming more air than their male partner. As part of the open water course, we were taught the skill of 'air sharing' in an emergency and because of this, we perfomed the airshare manoeuvre perfectly for real this time. Because we’d just learnt these techniques, it felt very natural and comfortable almost forgetting this was a real life situation on this occasion.

We didn’t manage to get many photos, just a few towards the end of the course, although we saw a huge range of marine life throughout the week. We just missed out swimming with a giant whale shark that was spotted swimming underneath our boat but unfortunately we weren’t quite geared up in time to jump in and see it.

The last five days of diving have been incredible and we're so pleased we managed to stay an additional couple of days to do the advanced course. One of the best things was the diving community. In a situation where we could've been perceived as newcomers or outsiders, we were welcomed with open arms, having drinks and food to celebrate our achievements with the instructors and other diving members.

We cannot wait to do more diving in the future and it's absolutely now on the cards for Indonesia!Read more