SSI Advanced Open Water Diver

You’ve got your Open Water card. The next step is the SSI Advanced Open Water Diver — five dives, two days, and a new depth limit of thirty metres.

Forget the word “advanced” for a moment. This isn’t a hard course. It’s a guided way to try five new specialties under your instructor’s eye, in a setting where nobody’s grading you. You finish it more confident, more efficient with your air, and certified to dive most of the world’s serious sites.

The five dives

Required:

• Deep dive to 30 metres. Slow descent down the wall, a few minutes at depth to feel how everything changes — light, colour, narcosis if it shows up — then a slow ascent.
• Underwater navigation. Compass work, natural navigation, distance estimation. By the end you can lead a dive plan back to the boat without surfacing for a peek.

Three electives — your pick:

• Night diving (the reef transforms after dark — Spanish dancers, hunting morays, bioluminescence in your fins)
• Perfect buoyancy (the dive every photographer wishes they’d taken sooner)
• Underwater naturalist (identify what you’re looking at)
• Digital photography (work with our underwater cameras)
• Multi-level diving (extend your bottom time safely)
• Fish identification
• Drift diving (we’ll take you to a current site for this one)

What’s included

• 2 days with an SSI Instructor
• SSI Advanced Open Water Diver digital or printed materials
• 5 adventure dives
• All equipment
• Certification fee
• Updated digital logbook

Talk to us about which electives match what you want from your diving. There’s no wrong combination.

Short on time?

If you don’t have enough time to complete the full Advanced Open Water course, you can still pick a single Adventure Dive — Deep or Night, one dive at a time — and start building experience. Each Adventure Dive you complete counts toward your future Advanced Open Water Diver certification. No expiry — come back next year and pick up where you left off.

Looking for “PADI Advanced Open Water”?

You may have searched for “PADI Advanced Open Water Gili Air”. We’ve moved fully to SSI certification — but our instructors hold both PADI and SSI ratings, and the two agencies’ courses are recognised interchangeably worldwide. Identical training, same depth limits, different paperwork. Bibi, our founder, was a PADI IDC Staff for many years before becoming an SSI Instructor Trainer in 2013; almost everyone on the team is dual-rated. Same dive, different card.