DIVING COURSES WITH
DIVINE DIVERS GILI MENO

Being a good swimmer will definitely make you more comfortable in the water, but the swimming requirements for the Open Water Diver course are rather modest and also doable by a 10-year-old child.

This is always one of the first questions that comes up: How long is this diving course going to take? Before you go scuba diving independently, you need to have the knowledge and skills to pull it off. A scuba diving certification course will give you just that and get you ready for some amazing underwater adventures. Each dive shop offers different schedules for different certifications. In general, we offer the courses with following durations. However, nothing is set in stone and we can totally adapt to your vacation schedule:

• Open Water Course: 3 days
• Advanced course: 2 days
• Rescue Course: 3 to 4 days (depending on if you have to complete first aid training as well)
• Specialty Courses: 1 to 2 days depending on the program

You certainly can! If you don’t know if diving is really for you, you can also simply start with a Discover / Intro Dive. In effect, your introduction to diving is the same as the first part of the Open Water Course. We will teach you some theory, jump into the swimming pool to practice some skills and top off the adventure with a visit to Nemo & Co. If you liked the Discover Scuba Diving program and your first Open Water Dive, you can simply continue with the Open Water Course with no financial disadvantage. You will be charged the Open Water Course only.

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You may have heard people refer to themselves as “scuba divers” or just “I’m a diver”. You might have never come across the term Open Water Diver until you have started searching for information regarding diving course. In general, when people say they have a diving license, ticket or scuba certification the are usually talking about an Open Water Certification which allows you to:

• Obtain air fills
• Rent dive equipment
• Dive on your own with a buddy to a depth of 18 meters
• Book boat dives
• Take additional (advanced) classes
• Dive all around the world

So now you have come across this Scuba Diver Course and you might wonder what this is all about? The Scuba Diver Course is a little bit more than half the Open Water Diver Course. It is an intermediate step towards full certification for divers who:

• Don’t have the time to complete the entire Open Water Course
• Can’t finish their open water training due to certain (often unforeseeable) circumstances
• Only want to dive with certified guides to a maximum of 12 meters

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Confined water is defined as a: 1) swimming pool or 2) confined open water which is an open water site that offers pool-like conditions with respect to clarity, calmness, and depth.

We conduct our dive training in our own purpose build training pool which classifies as confined water. You and your instructor will practice all required exercises together. Your instructor will explain the skills on the surface and demonstrates them before you will perform them yourself.

eLearning allows you to start your knowledge development online before you get your feet wet. A referral in general includes both, the knowledge development (theory lessons) and the confined water (pool practice) before your holiday

This can be one of those questions with quite many answers. Children develop physically and mentally at different rates, making it difficult to define an age at which kids can safely dive. You should take your child’s maturity, reasoning skills and physical limitations into consideration when determining if he or she is ready to begin scuba diving.

At the age of 8 kids can join the first diving programs where the depth is limited to maximum 2 meters. This is to make sure, that your child won’t suffer any pressure or other dive related injuries.  These Bubblemaker courses are as fun as they sound and they are an easy and safe introduction for kids to have their first breaths under water.

If you or your kid is younger than 15, he/ she will eb certified as a junior diver. Once diving maturity is reached (above 15 years of age) the certification automatically counts as a “normal” adult certification. However, if you wish to change it, just contact the diving agency and they will be able to remove the “junior” part of it.

When you received your latest and greatest certification card, you were certified for life. In theory you could just go to a dive center, rent some tanks and go on a shore dive. Do you think this is a smart idea? If you have been away from diving a long time long, your skills will have gotten rusty and it might be the best course of action to do a refresher. According to some dive organizations any diver who has not dived in six months needs to take a ReActivate (PADI) or Scuba Skills Update (SSI) course.

We at Divine Divers believe that those statements are a little too broad. We will first look at your dive experience, your comfort level and the time out of water. Only after we will recommend you to enrol into a refresher course or not. As a general guideline, we recommend refresher training after about 12 months of not diving. However, we also believe that very experienced divers who have not been diving in a while are usually their own best judge if they need a formal course to regain their scuba skills or not.

White sandy beaches, azure and year-round warm waters (28 to 29 degrees), the reef on your doorstep and a great lifestyle – does this sound like paradise to you? The Gili Islands are a postcard image of paradise and known as the turtle capital in the world – rightfully so, because both green and hawksbill turtles are abundant. Reef sharks are also frequently spotted and there is a broad range of marine life to be met on all dives. The dive sites are rarely more than a 15-minute boat ride away and diving is great all year round. The dry season is running from May to October and the rainy season from November to April. Rainy season sounds more extreme than it actually is because it hardly ever rains an entire day and the diving isn’t really affected by it.

In general, specialty programs are a great way to improve your current skills and learn new ones that peak your interest. Also, when you complete a certain number of logged dives and specialty programs you will earn and automatically receive some recognition cards (with SSI): Specialty Diver, Advanced Open Water Diver and Master Diver – one of the most elite ratings in diving today.

With PADI you can apply for the Master Scuba Diver Rating once you have completed the rescue course, five specialties and a minimum of 50 dives.

PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and SSI (Scuba School International) are two of the world’s prestigious scuba diving agencies and your best options for getting a diving certification. Luckily Divine Divers offers you both options. Let’s compare the PADI versus SSI certifications so you can choose the most suitable one for you.

PADI and SSI are both regulated and checked by the World Recreational Scuba Training Council (”WRSTC”). Their courses are more or less similar. The biggest difference is the teaching methodology.

• In PADI, you need to complete a set order to meet their standards and pass the course while SSI allows slightly more flexibility for students to grow in confidence by completing other skills first.
• Both agencies offer e-learning options as well as a printed manual. PADI requires that you purchase the materials while with SSI, you can choose to either borrow or buy your manual. The PADI e-learning course will cost you money whereas SSI offers the e-leaning course for free via the SSI app.
• With both PADI and SSI you will receive a digital certification card that is available directly after your course.

If you are looking for the equivalent PADI or SSI course, be careful as some of the courses have similar names but they are not comparable. For example, the PADI Advanced Open Water course is not same course as SSI Advanced Open Water course. Below, we have summarized the equivalents of the main PADI and SSI courses.

• PADI Open Water – SSI Open Water
• PADI Advanced Open Water – SSI Advanced Adventurer
• PADI Rescue Diver – SSI Diver Stress & Rescue
• PADI Divemaster – SSI Dive Guide