PADI Specialty Courses in Nusa Lembongan

An Advanced Open Water adventure dive gives you a single taste of a topic. A full specialty course spends a lot more time on it, with proper training and a certification that other operators and instructors recognise anywhere in the world. Contact us for current pricing and scheduling on any of the eight below.

Most divers pick a specialty based on what they enjoyed most during Advanced Open Water, though you do not need to have done that course first for several of the options here.

Deep Diver extends your working depth beyond the Advanced Open Water limit of 30 m up to a maximum of 40 m, across 4 guided dives. It suits the deeper, cooler parts of local sites where the water column drops away, and builds the awareness of narcosis and gas planning you need to dive that depth safely.

It pairs naturally with time spent at Crystal Bay, where the deeper, cooler water during mola mola season is exactly the kind of environment this specialty prepares you for.

A large share of diving around Nusa Penida is drift diving, letting the current move you along a reef rather than swimming against it. This specialty covers reading current, deploying a surface marker buoy, and staying with your group without fighting the water, all of which make local sites at Blue Corner and Toyapakeh noticeably more relaxed once you have done it.

Of every specialty on this list, Drift Diver is the one most directly useful for the kind of diving you will actually do here, which is why we recommend it first to most Advanced Open Water graduates.

Nitrox lowers the nitrogen percentage in your breathing gas, which extends your no-decompression time on repetitive dives, particularly useful if you are doing 2 or 3 fun dives a day. It is available on its own, or bundled with Advanced Open Water for 7,600,000 IDR.

The course itself is mostly theory and a single confined or open water dive to confirm you can handle Nitrox-filled cylinders correctly, so it is one of the quicker specialties to complete.

This specialty focuses on trim and weighting until hovering feels effortless. Better buoyancy means less contact with the reef and less air used per dive, which matters on the healthy coral around Nusa Lembongan and pairs naturally with our conservation courses.

It is also one of the more accessible specialties, open to Junior Open Water divers, and often the single most useful thing a newly certified diver can do to feel more relaxed underwater.

Diving after dark with a torch brings out a different, more nocturnal side of the reef, and teaches you to communicate with a buddy using light signals instead of hand signals alone. It works well on calmer sites close to the centre.

The change in atmosphere alone is usually reason enough to try it once, even for divers who otherwise never think about diving outside daylight hours.

You learn structured underwater search patterns and how to use a lift bag to bring an object safely back to the surface. It is a genuinely practical skill, and overlaps directly with the survey and recovery techniques used in our Dive Against Debris programme.

Divers heading toward Divemaster tend to find this specialty particularly useful, since search patterns and lift bag handling come up again during professional-level training.

Sidemount mounts your cylinders at your sides instead of on your back, changing your trim and giving you two independent air sources. It is worth trying if you are curious about the configuration, want a stepping stone toward technical training, or simply prefer the feel of it.

It also changes how you move through the water noticeably, which some divers find more comfortable for longer dives once they are used to it.

The most advanced of our specialties, Self-Reliant Diver requires PADI Advanced Open Water Diver certification, a minimum age of 18, and at least 100 logged dives. It teaches solo dive planning, redundant equipment and gas management for experienced divers who sometimes want to dive without leaning entirely on a buddy.

It is not about diving alone by default, it is about being properly equipped and trained for the times when that is genuinely the better option, with backup gear and a clear plan rather than improvising.