Balicasag Island
Test your deep wall skills alongside giant sea turtles and massive schools of jacks.
The SSI Advanced Open Water program is custom-built for certified divers who want to actively improve their underwater confidence, gain real-world experience, explore new marine environments, and develop advanced scuba skills while becoming completely comfortable in deeper water.
At Bohol Diving in Panglao, the SSI Advanced Open Water experience is not simply a quick certification course; it is a profound and structured progression into the universe of advanced diving. Imagine exploring dramatic deep vertical walls, mastering precise underwater compass navigation, witnessing the reef come alive during a night dive, and conquering tricky drift environments—all while continuing your diving education in some of the most biodiverse waters in the Philippines.
Unlike your initial beginner training, Advanced Open Water focuses heavily on practical, hands-on experience, confidence building, heightened situational awareness, and the development of your personal underwater autonomy. This course is the ideal next step for anyone holding an Open Water certification who wants to safely push their boundaries.
The SSI Advanced Open Water program allows certified divers to rapidly expand their experience, deep-water confidence, depth range, and specialty skills. Unlike traditional, classroom-heavy courses that force you back to a desk, SSI’s advanced curriculum focuses almost entirely on experience-based learning.
Under the direct guidance of a professional instructor, you will progressively complete specialty training dives, tackle real-world underwater scenarios, and complete practical confidence-building exercises. This structure allows you to:
Ultimately, earning your Advanced Open Water certification unlocks access to pristine, currents-swept, and advanced dive sites all across the globe.
Bohol offers one of the absolute finest marine environments in Southeast Asia for advanced scuba training. Divers have immediate access to world-class vertical wall dives, adrenaline-pumping drift environments, deep offshore reefs, protected marine sanctuaries, and spectacular night diving sites—all located within short, comfortable boat rides from the shores of Panglao Island.
Training in tropical conditions provides a massive educational advantage. Sweating in a thick wetsuit or fighting freezing waters can induce unnecessary anxiety; here, the warm water and phenomenal horizontal visibility allow you to stay 100% focused on your skills. This low-stress environment accelerates your learning curve, helping you absorb advanced concepts in navigation, buoyancy, and deep diving with ease, making you truly feel like an experienced diver.
Before stepping onto our boats, all students must officially affiliate with our dive center through the MySSI Application.
Once registered, you can upload a profile photo, link with our shop, and instantly unlock your Advanced Open Water digital learning materials to complete your specialty theory online before your course starts. This modern, paperless ecosystem is a primary reason why SSI is recognized globally as an industry leader in digital dive education.
To ensure a seamless and stress-free experience, we strongly recommend visiting our dive center in Panglao the afternoon before your course officially begins.
This quick preparation session allows us to handle the logistics in advance: we will verify your prior certifications, systematically size and organize your custom equipment configuration, double-check your digital theory progress, and run through your upcoming schedule.
More importantly, it gives you a relaxed opportunity to meet your instructor one-on-one. You can chat about your current comfort level, logbook history, personal buoyancy goals, and choose the specific specialty options that match your personal interests.
Your actual training schedule is highly flexible and may vary based on your personal interests, weather parameters, chosen specialties, and sea conditions. However, a highly popular and effective two-day training schedule typically unfolds like this:
We meet at the dive center to begin your thorough course briefing. Your instructor will introduce your chosen specialties, dive planning protocols, and equipment setups. Our core focus during this classroom briefing is real conceptual understanding and mental comfort preparation. We will dive into:
Divers take a break for lunch. You can relax at the dive center’s restaurant, check out nearby beachfront cafés, or explore local dining spots around Panglao. This window is essential to rest, hydrate, and mentally prep for the afternoon inwater sessions.
On this action-packed first day, you will complete three distinct specialty dives designed to rapidly build your confidence:
This dive strips away the mystery of underwater orientation. You will learn to marry high-tech compass use with natural navigation cues like sunlight angles, sand ripples, and reef topography. You will master swimming precise reciprocal headings, execution of square search patterns, underwater distance estimation, and finding your way back to the boat independently.
Widely considered the ultimate skill milestone by seasoned pros. This dive is an intensive workshop focusing on fine-tuning your weight distribution (trim), center of gravity, lung-volume breath control, advanced finning techniques (like the frog kick), and gas consumption optimization. Mastering this means effortless hovering, longer dives, and maximum protection for delicate coral reefs.
Your final dive of the day takes place after total twilight. Armed with high-powered flashlights, you will witness the reef undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. Daytime fish head to sleep while nocturnal predators like hunting lionfish, moray eels, octopuses, crabs, and squid emerge to track prey. Turning off your torch reveals the absolute magic of glowing marine bioluminescence.
Back at the dive center, you will sit down with your instructor to analyze your performance, review key specialty concepts, validate your digital exams, and officially log your dives inside the MySSI application.
The second day shifts focus toward depth management, advanced dive planning, and developing true dive buddy independence.
Your deep dive introduces you to depths between 24 and 30 meters, depending on sea conditions and your instructor’s running evaluation of your comfort. You will gain practical experience managing gas consumption scales, identifying signs of nitrogen narcosis, observing the physical effects of increased atmospheric pressure on colors, and executing mandatory safety stops.
Your second dive focuses entirely on navigating the calculations of your dive computer. You will learn how to monitor real-time no-decompression limits, evaluate safe ascent rates, execute repetitive dive tracking safely, and handle unexpected computer anomalies. SSI strongly prioritizes turning students into thinking, responsible, self-sufficient divers.
Unlike beginner programs that focus primarily on underwater survival drills, the SSI Advanced Open Water curriculum centers entirely on real diving competence. You will master how to:
Our instructors excel at adjusting every single training dive to perfectly challenge your current comfort levels, ensuring you walk away with genuine, long-term confidence.
Bohol is an absolute paradise for continuing education due to the shear diversity of its submarine landscapes. Within minutes of leaving the Panglao shoreline, advanced divers can explore deep drop-offs, thrilling drift currents, marine sanctuaries packed with giant pelagic schools, micro-heavy macro sites, and sprawling coral slopes.
Advanced divers flock to our shop to experience the legendary vertical walls of Balicasag Island, the deep offshore coral mounds of Pamilacan, and the dramatic macro night diving sites directly along the Panglao coastline. This incredible ecological diversity keeps your training engaging and versatile.
Because you will be diving deep and exploring after dark, the variety of wildlife you will encounter expands exponentially:
It is important to understand how SSI structures continuing education. The Advanced Open Water program acts as an immersive sampler, introducing you to the initial components of Deep, Navigation, Night, and Buoyancy diving.
If a particular environment captivates you during the course, you can seamlessly transition into a full SSI Specialty Course. Full specialties delve significantly deeper into advanced theory, specialized equipment operations, and extended inwater training to grant you full standalone credentials in disciplines like Nitrox, Stress & Rescue, or Deep Diving.
At the conclusion of your training dives, your instructor will run through a final review evaluating your overall comfort progression, buoyancy mastery, navigation precision, and handling of advanced safety protocols.
Once verified, you will complete your digital logbooks and your instructor will instantly issue your official SSI Advanced Open Water digital certification card. This prestigious rating signals your advanced competence to any dive operation worldwide, granting you seamless access to deep reefs, wrecks, and demanding charters globally.
The two-day schedule detailed above is simply our most popular format, but the program is entirely customizable! If you have already completed specific adventure dives or have distinct underwater interests, you are completely free to swap out dives to build your own tailor-made curriculum.
Available training dive options include: Deep, Navigation, Night, Perfect Buoyancy, Enriched Air Nitrox, Boat Diving, Fish Identification, Waves/Tides/Currents, Computer Diving, Search & Recovery, Marine Ecology, or DPV (Underwater Scooter) Diving.
At Bohol Diving, we strongly enforce a strict small-group policy for all advanced training. Limiting our student-to-instructor ratios guarantees that you receive direct, personalized coaching, highly specific buoyancy adjustments, and an inherently safer environment. We firmly believe in prioritizing real underwater comfort and skill mastery over merely running a certification assembly line.
Once you have earned your advanced credentials, the adventure is just beginning! You can immediately put your new skills to use by jumping onto our daily fun diving trips to the region's elite dive destinations:
Test your deep wall skills alongside giant sea turtles and massive schools of jacks.
Experience pristine offshore coral slopes, macro life, and high-energy drift diving.
Book a private boat and guide for complete scheduling flexibility and customized family trips.
Your personal safety is always our uncompromised priority. Please carefully track your travel itinerary and ensure you maintain a strict minimum safety window of 24 hours between your final scuba dive and your departure flight. Deep diving and multi-dive schedules increase nitrogen load, and waiting a full day before flying is an absolute necessity to prevent decompression sickness.
The course is efficiently completed over 2 days, which perfectly schedules your advanced briefings and 5 distinct open water ocean training dives.
During your dedicated deep training dive, you will safely descend to a maximum depth between 24 and 30 meters, strictly managed according to your personal comfort and environmental visibility.
Yes, absolutely! The curriculum is highly flexible. You can hand-select your training blocks based on your personal travel goals and interests.
Not at all. The course is structurally designed to be a highly rewarding, natural progression of your skills. There are no stressful survival drills; the focus is purely on expanding your comfort and enjoyment.
Yes! Many divers choose to transition directly into Advanced training to avoid developing bad habits and to immediately unlock deeper dive sites. SSI Open Water
You can look forward to seeing resident green sea turtles, hunting barracudas, swirling schools of jacks, octopuses, hidden frogfish, ornate nudibranchs, and a massive array of macro life.
While highly recommended due to the incredible marine life shift, night diving is entirely optional and can be swapped for another specialty if you prefer daytime operations.
Bohol offers a flawless combination of deep drop-offs, warm tropical waters, immaculate visibility, and minimal surface stress, making it an elite learning hub in the Philippines.
The SSI Advanced Open Water course with Bohol Diving is your ultimate opportunity to shed beginner anxieties, perfect your buoyancy, double your deep-water capabilities, and unlock the hidden nocturnal world. Join our expert team in Panglao and transform your diving capabilities in one of the most stunning marine environments the Philippines has to offer.