Description:
Night diving uses skills you already have, applied differently. Buoyancy matters more, since stirring up the bottom in low visibility creates a disorienting cloud. Buddy contact matters more too — you lose sight of each other faster in the dark, and finding each other again takes longer. The course teaches you to stay close, use light signals to communicate, and keep your bearings on a familiar site that suddenly looks unfamiliar in a torch beam.
The marine life changes after dark. Octopuses come out hunting. Lobsters move along the reef. Parrotfish sleep wrapped in mucus cocoons. Bioluminescent plankton flash when disturbed. Many divers cite their first night dive as the dive that hooked them. The course is built to make that first night dive predictable rather than nerve-wracking, with a PADI Instructor close by while you work out how to navigate by torchlight and how the seabed looks when you can only see what's directly in front of you.
Open to PADI (Junior) Open Water Divers aged 12 and up. Three open-water training dives at night under instructor supervision. No prior night experience needed. Good buoyancy control helps. Many dive shops time the course around a calm, predictable evening on a site the instructor knows well — the goal is to make the new variables (darkness, navigation, light handling) the focus, not the dive site itself.
Technical
