SSI Advance Adventurer Certification

Posted on 27/12/2018

5 Dives | 5 Specialities - All you need to know about SSI’s Advance Adventurer Certification

So, you’re already an Open Water Diver, have fallen in love with diving and want to dive more and more. But, perhaps you’re unsure about what steps to take. Worry not, we’ve got you covered.

Bear in mind, that Manta Dive Gili Air is affiliated to SSI – Scuba Schools International. So, first things first, if you are still contemplating whether to go for PADI or SSI, you should check out our PADI vs SSI blog, which has all the answers you need to make a decision..

So, for starters, as a part of the Advanced Adventurer Certification, you get to select 5 SSI Speciality programs. 2 are mandatory to progress your diving education. Each of the 5-open water dives you do as a part of this course, will be unique and structured in line with those specialities.

Yup, that’s right, no pool sessions for this course!

The main objective behind the Advanced Adventurer certification is that it lets you experience 5 different diving environments or skills, without requiring you to complete the entire speciality course. The SSI Advanced Adventurer gives you the opportunity to advance your dive skills, gain experience and help make up your mind about the type of diving that interests you.

If you’ve checked out the SSI website, you can see that there are a plethora of specialities which you can choose from and YES, you can choose any 3 of these specialities depending on what interests you and what is available in that area.

So, keeping in mind that your main motive is to get more out of your scuba diving experiences, these are the specialities we, at Manta Dive, recommend, as we feel these are the most helpful for you, to grow as a diver. Read on to find more:

1.   Deep Diving - Mandatory

2.   Navigation - Mandatory

3.   Perfect Buoyancy

4.   Waves, Tides and Current

5.   Night Diving and Limited Visibility

6.   Enriched Air Nitrox

7.   Photo and Video

8.   Wreck Diving

Advanced Adventurer: Deep Diving - Mandatory

As an open water diver, you are certified to dive to a depth of 18m. The Advanced Adventure Deep Diving teaches you the additional knowledge and considerations needed to dive that little bit deeper, allowing you to explore even more of our beautiful oceans. There are a huge variety of marine animals that only live at depth or are just much more commonly found below 18m. As well as additional points of interests such as wrecks. By completing the Advanced Adventurer you will be certified to dive to a depth of 30m, giving you access to more dive sites.

Advanced Adventurer: Navigation - Mandatory

In order to explore underwater, you need to be able to navigate. Whether it is to reach a specific point of interest, make the best route through a site, find your way back to the exit point or locate someone or something lost underwater. Not only a vital skill, but being able to navigate and understand where you are and where you are going, also boosts your confidence.

A good diver knows their way around the dive site, with the help of a compass and natural navigation techniques, is able to assist in searching for a lost buddy or an object underwater and this speciality teaches you exactly that.

One more dive and you can earn your Navigation speciality as well.

Advanced Adventurer: Perfect Buoyancy

We can’t stress learning the art of perfect buoyancy enough. The art of maintaining neutral buoyancy through your dives, isn’t only about hovering perfectly above the ocean floor.

The Perfect Buoyancy Adventure Dive is about understanding the relationship of your breath to your movement, how the placement of your weights can affect your positioning and trim, and how you can improve your efficiency underwater both through air consumption and swimming techniques.

Buoyancy is a skill that you  use on every single dive. Making Perfect Buoyancy, one of the most important skills to master. Not only will it make your dives more enjoyable, it will also improve your air consumption, allow you to focus on other areas of interest such as photography, whilst ensuring that you are not damaging the marine environment.

Advanced Adventurer: Waves, Tides and Current

There’s a saying that goes like this, ‘No Current, No fish’. Here in Indonesia, and specifically around the Gilis, almost all of are dives are current dives. Also known as drift dives.

The experience you have during a dive, can be majorly impacted by currents. If there is no current, it’s a nice, easy dive. But if there is, and you aren’t trained to dive in current, it’s only going to lead to stress, and potentially cancelling the dive.Which is why, knowing how to dive in currents will help you keep your calm and enjoy the dive.

Having the skills to properly plan your dive in case of a current, knowing the direction of current and deciding where to enter and exit, will boost your confidence and will ultimately lead you to have a good dive.

Advanced Adventurer: Night Diving and Limited Visibility

Night dives reveal the most interesting creatures that are sleeping during the day, and only come out when the sun goes down. When diving at night or in very limited visibility, there are some new skills and procedures that will allow you to enjoy your dive and stay safe. Plus, it’s

When you dive at night, it becomes more challenging to communicate with your buddy, which is why, not only do you need to know how to operate the diving lights, but you should also be aware about the different hand signals, which helps in better communication with your buddy. And you learn all this in this dive.

Over here at Manta Dive, we do our Night Dives at the Gili Air Harbour, which is home to the Mandarin fish, which is something you can only spot during those 15 minutes of twilight, before the sun goes down. Apart from this, if you wave your arm in the waters, you might see Bioluminescent Phytoplankton, similar to glowing dust.

Advanced Adventurer : Enriched Air Nitrox

Do you have good air consumption and want to increase your bottom time?

Look no further, as diving with EANx or Enriched Air Nitrox is the best way to  increase your no - decompression limits, increase your safety, and reduce the required length of the surface intervals when compared to air.

The speciality teaches you how to safely plan and dive with enriched air mixtures consisting of oxygen anywhere between 22% upto a maximum of 40%.

You can get an experience about diving with a Nitrox tank as part of your Advanced Adventurer Certification, and with one dive more you can even earn your speciality.

Advanced Adventurer: Underwater Photo and Video

Almost every scuba diver owns a GoPro these days.

But have you noticed the footage not being even close to how exciting the real experience was !

Taking photos underwater means you should be aware about the different kinds of underwater camera housings, camera lights, various filters, which you learn in this dive.

Now, you can make the most out of your GoPro and underwater camera and end up with professional quality underwater photos, by learning the different skills taught in this dive. And you get to boast to your friends about the amazing dive you had in the Gilis, by showcasing your amazing pictures.

Wreck Diving

Every diver is curious about mysterious wrecks that lie beneath the waves. Whether purposefully-sunk as an artificial reef for scuba divers, or lost as the result of an accident, wrecks are fascinating windows to the past.

Each wreck dive offers a chance for discovery, potentially unlocking a mystery others might have missed. However, there are a lot of hazards and dangers related to wreck diving, and with this dive, you get the skills and knowledge required to safely scuba dive above and around these underwater treasures.

You should ideally do your Advanced Adventurer certification, at a place which has a variety of dive sites, where skills across the different specialities can be practiced, and improved. In the Gilis, almost every dive is a drift dive, where you get to dive with turtles - the local residents, a variety of fishes like lion fish, trigger fish, morey eels, sting rays, a couple of white tip and black tip sharks, among others, and with 20+ dive sites scattered across the three Gilis, each unique in its own way, there’s no place better than Gili Air to get your Advance Adventurer certification.

If you still aren’t sure about choosing Gili Air as your destination, then this article will surely convince you.

The best thing about doing your Advanced Adventurer Certification here at Manta Dive, in Gili Air, is that you get to live the paradise life, ie. Starting the day with a dive, eating sumptuous meals in different quaint warungs scattered around Gili Air, ending the day with a chilled Bintang in hand, and witnessing the skies burn the most beautiful colours, as the sun sets behind Mt Agung.

Life surely can’t get better than this

Don’t you agree?

Comments