What's Involved in the SSI Advanced Adventurer certification?
The good news is there's no studying required at all! Instead your instructor will give you detailed briefings and debriefings for each dive. This will allow your instructor to concentrate on areas that are of interest, and useful to you. This is a personalised course, and you will learn about diving in the real world - Real Diving, Real Fun!
There are online materials available for the SSI Advanced Adventurer course, and they are included in the course price. There's a lot of really useful information contained in there. You will also find some review questions. They are designed to help you assess any areas you may need to brush up a little with your instructor. It's not mandatory, but we'd like you to read through the material before your dives, if you have the time.
A sample Advanced Adventurer course itinerary:
SSI AA Training Day 1:
During the first day we'll do two beach dives if possible. We find the beach dives the best way to start the course off for several reasons. Firstly, it's easy diving, so if you haven't dived for a while, it's a really nice way to include a refresher in the first dive. Secondly, we have no time limit on the dive, except your air consumption. On the day trip boats the maximum dive time is 50 minutes, whereas on the beach dives, we can stay under water for over an hour usually. And thirdly, the reefs on the beach dives are quite small, so there's a huge variety of marine life in a very small area. That gives us the best chance of seeing lots of unusual creatures. We regularly see cuttlefish, a colony of 20 to 30 sting rays, lots of nudibranchs, schooling barracuda and many many more reef fish.
Beach dives lend themselves perfectly to the Perfect Buoyancy specialty, so that is our recommendation. Also, as it's shallow it's a great dive site to do Navigation or Search and Recovery. If conditions are good, we can also do a Night dive there.
If conditions are not good for beach diving, or if you would prefer to be out on a boat, we can also offer a 2-dive boat trip on the first day.
SSI AA Training Day 2:
On the second day we take you out on our favourite day trip. On one of the dives you will reach up to 30m for the Deep dive. The dive sites we will visit are King Cruiser Wreck (perfect for a Wreck dive!) Shark Point (so many soft corals it's a perfect site to practice photography) and Koh Dok Mai, where the currents can be quite strong so it becomes a natural drift dive.
These are just our suggestions of course. If there's a specialty that you'd like to try out, please do let us know!
Find out more by using the contact forms here, send us an email, give us a ring or pop into our Dive Center in Kata beach for an informal chat with our friendly team.
