When you think about Tulamben, Bali, you might think about the world-famous USAT Liberty Wreck, incredible snorkeling, and easy dive sites with rewarding experiences around the village. But do you know that the Tulamben is also an excellent diving spot in Bali to get your Advanced Open Water Certification?
The Advanced Open Water certification meant to help you improve your diving skills, so you can begin soon after getting your PADI Open Water Diver certification. Through various Adventure Dives, the course helps you gain confidence and expand your dive skills. Under the guidance of our PADI Instructor, you try out different specialties while gaining expertise. You log dives and improve your skills as you discover new ways to enjoy scuba diving. So, you’ll want to have your Advanced certification in a place where the dive site is reliable but challenging enough to get you beyond the beginner level. That’s why Tulamben is perfect and here’s our experience of getting my Advanced Open Water in Tulamben. Read on!
What to Expect from Advanced Open Water Diving in Tulamben
You studied the fundamentals of scuba diving in Open Water. You will improve your skills and learn how to think and act like a diver in this development course. Under the guidance of an instructor, you can get more experience, continue your diving education, and try out other dive specialties.
Five adventure dives make up the PADI Advanced Open Water Course. The first dive of a specialty course is an adventure dive. With a wide range of PADI specialty courses to choose from, the Advanced Course will introduce you to the vast array of different forms of diving available. In Tulamben, you will have five dives for the Advanced adventures. The first two are deep dive to thirty meters and an underwater navigation dive, and after completing them then you can choose three dives from PADI’s adventure set.
First: Fun Scuba Diving in the USAT Liberty Tulamben
The Tulamben’ Liberty shipwreck is the most well-known diving site in this part of Bali. The USAT Liberty wreck was the main attraction for me, so seeing it on my first dive was a dream come true. Because there is so much of the ship to examine, this wreck has really put Tulamben on the map. The Liberty is nearly 400 feet long, and because of its location on a sandy slope, it can be explored at depths ranging from 25 to 100 feet. The 400-foot-long deck, which would normally be festooned with navigational equipment, communications towers, and a spider web of cables, is the most noticeable feature of the Liberty because it was a transport ship. But you don’t have to deal with all of that because the ship was largely dismantled by American forces and Balinese workers, thus the deck is basically safe.
We stayed in the shallow parts for my dive because there was plenty of light from the surface. It was still a really perplexing sensation, and I couldn’t tell which way was up because the ship was standing on its end.
Ps: You can even snorkel here as this Tulamben dive site is very appropriate for beginners!
Second: The Navigational Dive in Tulamben
The next dive in Tulamben is very important and would feel more like a course rather than an adventure. To be a confident diver, you must first learn how to navigate in the strange environment of the underwater—where your landmarks are mostly corals—and keep track of your position. It’s not fun to finish a dive only to realize you’ve wandered a hundred yards from the boat or the beach. To navigate underwater, acquaint yourself with a map of the dive location and pencil in the path you’ll be traveling ahead of time. Only a dive compass and the ability to count are required to follow that path. The compass will tell you which way to go, and counting your flipper kicks will tell you how far you’ve travelled.
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Third: Deep Diving in USAT Liberty Tulamben
A dive down to 30 meters is required for the Advanced Open Water course. The deep dive brought us back to the Liberty, and this time we went all the way to the bottom. We didn’t enter the ship this time because it was meant to be a depth training dive. Instead, I concentrated on breathing at 30 meters, which is more difficult than it appears. At that depth, the water pressure is four times higher than at sea level, and you can feel the extra effort required to inhale each breath.
Things can grow a little more perilous during the deep dive. The lower you go, the more issues can occur, including nitrogen poisoning, running out of air (you use it faster at depth), and, most importantly, decompression sickness.
Ask any experienced diver, and they’ll tell you that you don’t even need to travel deep to observe interesting things. The bright coral and exotic fish that divers normally wish to see adore the sun, therefore they like to be at the surface where it is brighter. Diving shipwrecks, which are often deeper than the 18 meters allowed under PADI’s Open Water certification, is the one exception to this restriction.
Fourth: Night Diving
It was time for another first for me, a night dive, around sunset. As usual, our instructor and us suited up on the beach, this time with two dive lights, which are large, extra-bright flashlights that overheat if not submerged. The sun had begun to sink below the horizon by the time we got into the water. It was far more incredible than I could have imagined. We returned to the Liberty wreck, and without the sunshine flowing through its fissures, it appeared unearthly. Colors seemed more vibrant, and whatever I shone my light on stood out against the darkness in stark contrast. We can’t say enough about how much we enjoy night diving!
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Fifth: Underwater Photography
PADI has a variety of specialty courses you can choose for the Advanced Open Water Certification. Those are:
- Coral Reef Conservation
- Boat Diver
- Drift Diver
- Night Diver
- Peak Performance Buoyancy
- Altitude Diver
- Wreck Diving
- Cavern Diver
- Underwater Photography
- Underwater Videography
- And many more.
Keep in mind that not all diving centers offer all possibilities, and that availability varies depending on local conditions.
While the dive in USAT Liberty itself can be categorized as wreck diving and it’s quite impossible to have drift diving in Tulamben, we choose Underwater Photography for our last dive! It was wonderful but you can always try fish identification or underwater naturalist that are just equally interesting.
Would you love to have your advanced open water diving in Tulamben?
Louise Bailey