Best Destinations to Advance Your Scuba Skills

First, you say “yes.” Something draws you to the water and you sign up for your Open Water Diver certification. You finish. Everything is different. Now, you breathe underwater. You’ve done it — you’ve finally discovered the answer to the great question of what lies below. But then … hold on. There’s more. There’s deeper. There’s inside a wreck. There’s diving at night. These are all experiences that — as soon as you find out about them — you want more.

Cue the Advanced Open Water Diver course. This certification opens up so many possibilities, offering newer divers the chance to explore what’s out there, choosing from 19 exploratory dives, including night dive, peak performance buoyancy, drift dive, underwater naturalist and more.

If you’re ready for what’s next, read on to see our picks for the best destinations to advance your dive skills.

The Florida Keys

The Spiegel. The Duane. The Vandy. The Bibb. They’re household names for a reason. To any wreck diver or wannabe wreck diver, few places deliver such a collection of large, made-safe artificial reefs as the Florida Keys.

“The main reason to come here for your advanced course is because we have some of the best wrecks at that level,” says Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers, a Key Largo-based scuba center. The structures of wrecks such as the Duane and Spiegel start at 60 feet, on average. With the sand at 120 and 130 feet respectively, that leaves lots of room for exploration.

PADI’s wreck-adventure dive is not required for its advanced-diver certification — only navigation and deep are, along with three other adventure dives of the student’s choosing — but it’s a top pick for most students.

When teaching, Dawson takes his charges for a “double dip” on a single wreck. The first dive satisfies the deep-dive requirement, and the second is the wreck-adventure dive.

Going deep prepares students for the slower reaction times that come with depths of 100 feet and greater, and the second allows them to settle in and get personal with these greats.

When divers start homing in on the ships and the layouts, the questions start arising.

“People are just in awe of the size of these wrecks, and the history of the ships before they were decommissioned, and how they even get sunk and become wrecks,” Dawson says.

Pretty quickly, they’re ready for what comes next — typically the wreck-diver specialty course — but before that comes the navigation dive.

And for that, luckily, not all Keys dives are deep.

“Many of our reefs are in the 20- to 50-foot range, allowing for hourlong dives to really devote time to working on skills,” Dawson says.

Divers learn to use a compass to orient themselves underwater, and learn to follow a directional heading — but mastering navigation extends well beyond the compass.

Learning your way around a shallow reef allows you to start depending on natural navigation.

“You don’t have to stare at your compass the whole time,” Dawson says. “You pick a coral head and stare at the coral head as you travel.”

Which makes for a much more scenic learning experience. After all, if you’re traveling to the Keys for an education, you might as well take the scenic route when you can.

Signature Dive

USS Spiegel Grove

At 510 feet long, the Spiegel dominates South Florida as the wreck to add to your diving resume.

“Even on a clear day of visibility, you drop down and you start seeing the wreck, but you can never see the whole thing at once — it’s just that big,” Dawson says.

The highlights he makes sure advanced students check out include the two crane arms and the helicopter landing pad on the top deck, the radar room, the hallways of the bridge and the different levels of the superstructure.

But those are just the beginning of the Spiegel’s wonders. It was purpose-sunk, and, with eight mooring-line starting points, offers infinite routes of exploration.

Says Dawson, “You can spend a couple days or even a couple years on the Spiegel and still see new things.”

Hawaii

“We personally choose to do a night dive during the advanced course — we always recommend it,” says Teri Leicher, owner of the Kona, Hawaii-based Jack’s Diving Locker.

The night dive isn’t one of the two required dives for the advanced open water diver certification, but, Leicher says, “We feel that it gives our divers a more well-rounded experience.”

Students tend to agree. “So far, 99.9 percent of our students take us up on the night dive.”

And for good reason. Kona is home to the manta-ray night dive, legendary for its success rate in bringing divers close to this animal with a wingspan of up to 22 feet.

But there’s far more to night diving than mantas.

A large portion of Hawaii’s fish population, electric in color and wildly patterned, are found nowhere else. With that great variety of species comes a great variety of behaviors witnessed only at night.

“You’ll learn about all-new fish behaviors, like fish whose color changes at night,” Leicher says. “A lot of the butterflies become duller in color at night.”

Parrotfish create mucous cocoons to disguise their smell.

“The fish with the big red eyes, like squirrelfish, come out — they see better at night. And the sounds you hear? Shrimp and lobster are really loud.”

Of course, the night dive is just one of the five adventure dives required for the advanced-diver course. One deep dive is required, and Hawaii serves up the right underwater terrain, including arches, canyons and swim-throughs formed by lava flows, and the conditions — water temperatures between 76 and 82, and almost never a current — that make for an easier experience to enjoy it all.

“One of the challenges of diving in water that’s as clear as ours is that people haven’t learned yet just how quickly you can get into deep water without even realizing it,” Leicher says.

“People don’t expect it to be that different, but then you get down there and your reaction time slows down significantly. That’s the sort of experience you want to have while under the watchful eye of an instructor.”

The manta mania off Kona, Hawaii, is a perfect introduction to night diving.

Signature Dive

Manta Ray Night Dive

Kona is famous for the just-about-guaranteed experience of night diving with mantas yards from shore. Almost every evening, at least a dozen, and sometimes as many as 50, mantas descend on the sites to feed on clouds of plankton, which, like moths, are pulled to the underwater floodlights. The resulting show lasts as long as your air supply.

“This is obviously one of the top dives in the world,” says Leicher, who’s on a first-name basis with the mantas, most of which are regulars at the feed.

“We often get surprise visitors, like spinner dolphins, whitetip reef sharks and the monk seals, a rare and endangered species. Even when the mantas aren’t there, it’s an amazing dive.”

Cozumel

“Diving Cozumel is a matter of coordination — you need to learn to multitask,” says Laura Alcala, general manager at Dive Paradise scuba center on the island of Cozumel, Mexico.

What she’s referring to is the mix of challenges that Cozumel presents an aspiring advanced-open-water diver all at once: a wall, a deep dive and a current. In this setting, divers jump right into the skills necessary for the Drift Diver, Deep Diver, Multilevel Diver and Peak Performance Buoyancy Diver adventure dives.

“Here, you really need to pay attention to gauges,” Alcala says.

The more you answer the siren call of the depths, the faster you’ll empty that tank. Divers need to learn to check their depth and air pressure just as often as a driver eyeballs speed and gas-tank level.

“You learn to walk that fine line,” she says. “You’re enjoying all the new things to see in a new destination, but you must still be paying attention to your equipment.”

Then consider the nearly constant current in Cozumel.

“It’s so much more enjoyable not having to manage yourself along the reef, but to allow yourself to be pulled ever so gently by our mild current.”

Because divers aren’t kicking as much, they have to learn to dial in their buoyancy control. Without current, divers kick along, usually somewhat mindlessly, and fail to realize that their kicking is compensating for their lack of neutral buoyancy. To varying extents, newer divers are almost always kicking themselves up off the bottom.

Take away the kicking — as happens with a current — and most divers sink, typically dropping anywhere from 5 to 20 feet before they realize it.

Once you find that sweet spot of neutral buoyancy and checking your gauges often enough to stay aware of your air-consumption rate, you’ll find what most divers like about drift diving — but you’ll also discover another hurdle.

“It is easier to do a drift dive, yes, but it’s also easy to lose your orientation,” Alcala says.

Thankfully, every diver who finishes the advanced-open-water-diver certification learns navigation skills. In Cozumel, part of the navigation training is simply growing accustomed to having nothing below your fins but dark blue.

Says Alcala, “It’s a feeling that takes some getting used to, but once most divers do, it’s a feeling they can’t get enough of.”

Signature Dive

Santa Rosa Wall

The wall at Santa Rosa starts at 50 feet — just shy of the 60-foot depth restriction placed on open-water divers — and it’s one of the sheerest drop-offs on the island.

“You absolutely can’t see the bottom down at 1,400 feet,” Alcala says.

Newer divers hear that number, and foreheads crinkle. Excitement swirls with nervousness.

But keeping the wall on your shoulder is grounding, as is the experience of sharing the water alongside hawksbill sea turtles, lobsters, French and queen angelfish, and hogfish, all of which can bring a student from the precipice of worry back into the moment.

For most divers, it doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to build up confidence, aided by the 100-plus feet of visibility and warm water.

Soon, they’re comfortable enough to explore the site’s holes, swim-throughs and tunnels, taking on the buoyancy challenges and mental hurdles of everything the island throws at them.

Grand Cayman

With 365 dive sites on the menu, no other Caribbean destination offers more diversity. That list, covering sites on every coast of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, includes sheer walls, canyons, grottoes, reefs and wrecks.

“Our shore diving is great for those who want to work on navigation and peak performance buoyancy, the reefs are great for learning fish identification, the boat dives give you experience with deep diving — pretty much the only thing we don’t offer is low-visibility training,” says Emma-Jane Fisher, master scuba diver trainer at Sunset House.

With no freshwater run-off, the island is known for exceptional visibility — which quickly builds confidence in newer divers as they can more easily establish bearings and get comfortable with their surroundings.

That visibility is an asset on every dive, and can become a training tool in and of itself.

“Let’s say you are doing a navigation dive on a wall and you swim out into the blue,” Fisher says. “You have such good visibility that if you lose that reference point of the wall, it’s possible that you won’t know which way is up. You can lose your equilibrium, and that’s one of the issues that we teach you how to sort through.”

Grand Cayman is also a stellar spot to take up shore diving: Conditions are typically calm, and, thanks to a topography with clearly defined features, most divers pick up on the tricks to natural navigation quickly.

“We are very lucky in that we have the main wall and the mini-wall, and so many big, distinctive coral heads,” Fisher says. “Those are huge pieces of information that really help with natural navigation.”

During navigation training, instructors will point out the clues they rely on to orient themselves back to shore, from counting sand channels to paying attention to which way sunlight is pouring down on a reef and casting shadows.

Adds Fisher, “Plus, after advanced students have done a guided dive with an instructor, then they do it on their own, and most people are fine.”

The Cayman Islands’ USS Kittiwake and sunlit swim-throughs attract divers of all skill levels.

Signature Dive

USS Kittiwake

Thanks to the removal of doors, hatches, bulkheads and large sections of hull, which allows for heightened viewing opportunities inside, the Kittiwake is one of the best artificial wrecks for advanced diver hopefuls, who are required to stay outside of any ship. Tours tend to include stops at the bow, propeller and transom, where the name Kittiwake is written, as well as a look through a door to the hyperbaric chamber.

Perhaps most exciting about the ship’s exterior is who passes by.

Says Fisher, “There’s a good migration of marine life back and forth from the wall. Quite often there are large schools of horse-eye jacks that circle the rigging of the ship, a green moray by the anchor area, and stingrays and eagle rays foraging in the sand around the ship.”

Bay Islands, Honduras

No other Caribbean destination attracts more international scuba students than the Honduras island of Utila, which makes up the Bay Islands with Roatan and Guanaja. This hideaway has created an entire island-wide culture of dive education, happening by day in the classroom, and by night, in the over-water bars and late-night bungalow hangouts.

Utila owes its popularity to its position along the backpackers’ South and Central America route. More and more dive shops popped up to cater to the increasing numbers of travelers targeting the destination as the place to get scuba certified.

“With more and more dive shop competition, everyone feels the need to up their game,” says Asa Croak, dive shop manager for Dive Utila. “We have a high quality of staff on this island.”

Dive Utila, for example, only hires instructors holding the Master Scuba Diver Trainer rating, whereas most other dive shops largely employ open-water scuba instructors, which is the minimum requirement necessary to teach.

Plus, the shops compete with one another to give the students more value for their money. Dive Utila includes two bonus dives with every Advanced Open Water Diver course.

Utila also is easily one of the most relaxed islands, with no shortage of nightlife. “Throughout it all, we never lost that fun vibe that started it all off,” Croak says. “Any bar you go to, you’ll be having a beer with other students. You might hear about a specialty or dive site that you didn’t know about. There’s a wealth of dive information always flowing on this island.”

Utila is well-known for its nightlife — Guanaja, its neighbor island to the west, would be famous for its utter solitude, if more divers had ever heard of it in the first place.

“You won’t ever see a handful of boats at one site like you do at other places,” says Lee Gano, resort manager for Cabanas on Clark’s Cay.

With little stress placed on the reefs of Guanaja, the corals at every site have retained their vibrancy.

“A lot of places, you do your training dives, and you feel like you missed out on the ‘nice’ dives,” Gano says. “You won’t have that feeling here at all.”

What’s more, the reefs are covered in life, giving divers lots to work with when taking the Fish Identification dive.

“New divers especially get so excited about what they’re seeing, but they don’t know what anything is yet,” Gano says.

This course gives them the words to describe life on the reefs, which, on Guanaja, stretches to include much of what’s documented in fish identification books, from indigo hamlets to rock beauties.

Together, Guanaja and Utila serve up so much to explore: sloping reefs, underwater pinnacles, seamounts, caverns, bioluminescent night dives and impressive, sheer drop-offs. Study the map, and you might find yourself wanting more dives than you signed up for, which is only fitting, because that’s exactly what the Advanced Open Water Diver course prepares you for.

The Bay Islands offer a beautiful backdrop for your training, like this Roatan reef.

Signature Dive

The Maze Only the Maze delivers the sheer-wall intensity of the north end of Utila with a wide, gently sloping shoulder section. Right under the buoy is the maze, a series of windy sand chutes and canyons leading toward the wall. This stretch allows divers to acclimate to the drama of the wall, and serves as a landing place with shallower terrain perfect for the start or end of the dive.

It’s also riddled with fish-identification opportunities. In the deep section, divers can see nurse sharks, tarpon and barracuda. In the shallows, divers will likely encounter midnight parrotfish, and, Croak says, “rainbow parrotfish if you’re really lucky.”

Schools of creole wrasse add to the overall color of the site.

Adds Croak, “Plus, if you’re going to see manta rays on Utila, you’re going to see them there at the Maze.”