What is the Advanced Open Water Course?
If you want to bring your passion for scuba diving further, there is no better opportunity than to proceed with your Advanced Open Water Course.
It will help you improve your diving skills thanks to the five adventure dives you can choose. Thanks to the perfect buoyancy adventure dive, you will master your buoyancy. You will be able to navigate through a dive site thanks to navigation skills. And finally, you will have the chance to go for deeper dives. After obtaining the advanced certification, the depth limit you can reach is 30 m (while it was 18m with the open water certification).
First of all, for the advanced course, you need to choose five adventure dives. Navigation and deep dive are compulsory. The most commonly chosen adventure dives are perfect buoyancy, night dive, drift dive, wreck dive, and fish ID.
General Advantages of doing your Advanced Open Water course (AOW) in the Gilis
All the dive sites around the Gilis are reachable in about 10-15 minutes. Usually, you go out for a dive then you come back. It means you have time to relax a bit between the dives.
The visibility around the Gilis is really great. It ranges from 20 to 28 m which allows divers to have a wide view of the underwater world around them.
The temperature of the water is warm, around 27C. This makes you enjoy the dive even more without worrying too much about the cold. Given that, you just need to use a short wetsuit that gives you more freedom of movement.
Last but not least, there are some currents but not so strong as other dive sites around Indonesia. Since you are learning new skills, its fundamental you learn these in a proper way. All of these conditions definitely facilitate that.
Perfect adventures to do in Gili T
Night Dive
If you have never tried it before, this can be an amazing experience. Diving is considered by many people as a form of meditation. This feeling can be even more amplified by the darkness. Moreover, at night the dive sites are not so crowded as they may be during the day.
Gili Trawangan offers a good opportunity to do night dives directly from the shore. Biorock is an artificial reef that is home to several kinds of marine life. You can simply walk from the beach into the deep part.
This can help those who might be scared of jumping off the boat into the dark. Because let’s face it, a night dive can be a bit challenging.
Nonetheless, in Biorock you can observe several types of nocturnal marine life and different nudibranch species. For example, the Pikachu nudibranch (thecacera pacifica) can make your night underwater exploration even more interesting.
Deep Dive
The visibility in Gili Trawangan can be up to 29-30 m. And that’s insane! When you go for your first deep dive and drop down 30 m, it’s incredible to have the possibility to see the bottom.
All dive sites around the Gilis are known for this peculiarity. Of course, there can be days where the visibility is around 20 m, but still good enough to have a wide view of the underwater world around you.
Moreover, in some dive sites, you can find pinnacles, a wreck or still untouched reef to observe. For instance, in the deeper part of Shark Point, there is an old wreck: an amazing home for corals and fish.
Wreck Dive
In several dive sites, there are wrecks sunken down below the surface. One quite famous is the Bounty Wreck dive site. It’s the perfect spot to find many fish and where the corals are growing.
It’s a passenger platform which was sunken many years ago. The most interesting feature of the wreck is that it sits in the bottom but it’s turned upside down! It sits diagonally at the bottom thus the top of the wreck is 7-8 m and the deepest part rests at about 20 m making it easily accessible for all groups of divers.
The top of the wreck is flat and allows many corals to grow on it. We can find large schools of fish and often cute baby cuttlefish!
Another interesting wreck can be found on the dive site named Shark Point. The wreck is called “Glenn Nusa” and is sitting at a depth of about 26-28 m. It is a larger wreck compared to the Bounty.
It is perfect for your advanced course as you get another opportunity to go deep and get your wreck adventure at the same time. We can often see some reef sharks swimming close to the wreck.
Another highlight at this wreck is the schools of huge sweetlips that live here. You can also find some small critters and nudibranchs on the walls of the wreck. Given that, you are going to have an amazing time doing your wreck adventure dive on the Gilis!
Drift Dive
Indonesia is famous for the ITF “Indonesian ThroughFlow” which moves the water from the Pacific to the Indian ocean thus there are currents on all the dive sites all year round. A very useful adventure dive you can do during your advanced course is the drift dive.
This adventure dive helps you to understand currents a lot better and turns you into a better diver having that perfect buoyancy and trim. Not only this you have a lot of fun diving as well as its the only time you know how it feels to be like Superman flying in the ocean currents!
Are you ready to take the next step to improve your scuba diving skills and deepen your knowledge? Send us an email! We will be more than happy to provide you with all the required information!
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