PADI Advanced Open Water Diver Course in Nusa Lembongan

There is no written exam at the end of Advanced Open Water. Instead, you complete 5 adventure dives with an instructor, each one a taste of a different specialty, which builds real underwater skill faster than more classroom time would.

Think of it less as a harder version of Open Water and more as a guided sampler. You come out the other end with genuine experience in a handful of different disciplines, and a clearer idea of which ones you would like to go deeper into later.

Deep Diver and Underwater Navigation are compulsory. The deep dive takes you beyond the 18 m Open Water limit toward the 30 m Advanced limit, where your instructor talks you through the effects of depth and how to plan a dive that stays well within safe limits.

Navigation covers compass headings and natural navigation, using landmarks on the reef to find your way, which is useful on almost every dive you do afterwards, not just as an exam skill you never touch again.

You pick 3 more from options including Drift, Peak Performance Buoyancy, Fish Identification, Night Diver, Underwater Photography and Search and Recovery. Your instructor talks through what each one involves before you commit, and helps match your choices to conditions on the day and what genuinely interests you.

If one of these grabs you, it is worth turning into a full PADI specialty course later, since the adventure dive only gives you a single taste rather than the depth of training a dedicated specialty provides.

A large share of diving around here is drift diving, letting the current carry you along a reef rather than swimming against it, so the Drift adventure dive tends to be the most practically useful elective for local conditions. Once you have done it, sites that would otherwise feel intimidating because of current become genuinely enjoyable.

The extra depth range also opens up more of what Nusa Penida's dive sites offer, once you are comfortable and certified for it, and the Night Diver elective is worth considering too, since after-dark diving reveals a noticeably different side of the same reef you dived during the day.

This is one of the reasons we run Advanced Open Water as a standard 2-day course rather than something bolted onto Open Water automatically: the electives genuinely work better once you have had a chance to think about which ones actually match how you want to dive here.

Nitrox uses a higher oxygen, lower nitrogen air mix, which extends your no-decompression time on repetitive dives. It does not change how deep you can go or how long a single dive lasts on its own, but if you are doing 2 or 3 dives in a day, it noticeably increases how much time you get to spend underwater across the whole day.

The Advanced Open Water plus Nitrox combo bundles both certifications into a 3-day package for 7,600,000 IDR, and is worth considering if you plan to do several dives a day once certified, particularly during a longer stay on Nusa Lembongan.

There is no fixed order beyond fitting the Deep and Navigation dives in somewhere across the two days, so your instructor plans around the weather and which sites suit each elective best on the day. That flexibility is one of the advantages of a small operation: the schedule bends around conditions rather than the other way round.

Expect a short briefing before each dive covering what you are aiming to learn from it, followed by a debrief afterwards on what went well and what to work on for the next one.

As with our other courses, groups are capped at 3 students to 1 instructor. Over 5 dives that adds up to real one-on-one attention, and if one elective takes longer to click than expected, there is room in the schedule to spend more time on it rather than moving on regardless.

The natural next step is Emergency First Response followed by PADI Rescue Diver, both required before Divemaster training. If conservation interests you, our Manta Ray and Mola Mola Conservation day only needs Open Water Diver, so you do not have to wait until after this course to do it.

Plenty of divers also simply move straight into fun diving at the new depth and site range Advanced Open Water opens up, without necessarily planning any further courses straight away, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to use the certification too.