Its a 10 am start if you are doing the Advanced Course on Koh Tao so you’ll be pleased to know you get a little bit of a lie-in after celebrating becoming open water divers… hurrah!
5 dives on the Advanced Course on Koh Tao
First off you’ll meet your instructor, who’ll go through the paperwork and give you the choice of dives you can do. The advanced course is five dives, and you’ll need to do the deep dive and navigation dives, but then you can choose the other dives you want to do, such as a wreck dive, fish identification dive, buoyancy dive, night dive, or photography dive. Generally, weather permitting, we would recommend you choose the buoyancy, night and wreck dives to get the most out of the course. Once you’ve chosen, you’ll be given a dive computer to be used on each dive, and a compass for the navigation dive. The instructor will show you how they both work, and then you’ll spend some time walking on the beach like a zombie getting to grips with how to use different navigation techniques. If you haven’t got any equipment we can get you set up with everything that you’ll need, then it’s lunchtime woo hoo.
Afternoon, day one.
You’ll meet up again and go out on the boat at around 12:45 pm to do the buoyancy and navigation dives. You already learned how to control your buoyancy on the open water course, but you’ll be given lots of tips on how to fine-tune it, with the whole dive being dedicated to allowing you to practice. Once you’ve had plenty of time to do this, the rest of the dive is spent seeing what’s on the dive site. Remember, you can use what you learned on every subsequent dive you do. After an hour on the boat sunbathing, you’ll head back into the water at a different dive site to do the navigation dive. You’ll already have been taught how to use your compass on the beach, but underwater is a whole different kettle of fish, you have to keep track of where you’re going, think about your buoyancy, think about your buddy, keep the same depth, avoid other divers, and any other obstacles you come across! We’ll also show you how to use features of the dive site to help you with navigating, so-called natural navigation. It’s great fun and you’ll probably never want to dive without a compass again!
Night Dive- day one.
At Big Blue, we run night dives every other night, but if you have to leave the next day, we can usually fit one in for you on the first day. The night dive is the closest you will come to being in space without being a billionaire able to hitch a ride on a Russian rocket. It’s amazing! Not unsurprisingly, you’ll need it to be dark, so we go out at around 6 pm, and you’ll begin the dive as it’s still getting dark, just to let you get used to it before it goes completely dark. Oh yeah, and you’ll be given a torch! The fish you see in the daytime tend to hide at night, and the fish that sleep in the day come out to hunt, such as barracuda. You may also see crabs, blue-spotted stingrays, and the occasional octopus. There’s always a chance of seeing a sleeping turtle too! If you’ve seen the Leonardo Di Caprio film the Beach, you can also see the bioluminescent plankton- unforgettable- the plankton, not the film.
Day two, morning.
Early start again (so soon after dives three and four of open water!?), but well worth it, this is the deep dive. Your instructor will take you down to as close to 30 meters as you’re comfortable with, and teach you deeper diving and ascent procedures. Then as you shallow up, you’ll use the rest of your air to fun dive around the dive site to see what amazing marine life is around. You’ll end up much more confident in your own diving abilities, and with any luck be asking if anyone else saw that “massive whaleshark”! After an hour’s surface interval on the boat, you’ll head over to the wreck for the fifth and final dive of the course, the wreck dive. We’re very lucky on Koh Tao, we have a wreck that was purposefully sunk as an artificial reef. It’s an old US Navy landing craft infantry boat, bought by the Thai Navy and donated in 2011. Called the HTMS Sattakut, it sits at between 27 and 30 meters and has a big gun at the bow (that’s the front), and a smaller gun on the stern (the rear). A host of marine animals have made it their home, and it’s an incredible experience seeing this huge rusting metal thing underwater that you’re so used to seeing on the surface. A little bit of history too, Very cool.
So that’s it, you’ll finish the Advanced Course on Koh Tao at around 12 pm on the second day. If no-one is in a hurry to go home the night dive may be at 6 pm that night, but generally, it takes a day and a half to complete. Given your card at the end of the course, you’ll be certified to dive to 30 meters and certified to dive at night. You’ll feel like you’re starting to really get the hang of this diving malarky and be hungry for more, and more, and more.
Did you know we do Tech and Wreck diving as well!?
For any more information on the advanced course, contact us or check out our courses page on this website.
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