Day 151! Today officially marks 3 weeks in Koh Tao! Time FLYS when you’re having fun! Today’s dives were just insane. I thought yesterday was nuts… today was even crazier.

Once my head hit the pillow last night, I was out like a rock. I woke up a bit exhausted but ready to take on another day of diving. So, after finishing my blog post from the day prior, I headed over to the hostel lobby for another scrumptious muesli bowl.

I played some pool and chatted with friends. I also got to hang out a bit more with my dive buddy Marte.

Today’s dive started after lunch, so Marte, Lydia, and I chowed down on some chicken curry and rice before setting out for our adventure of the day.

(In some of my homework for diving I had to read pages from a diving manual… and they say don’t eat gassy foods… but that’s pretty hard in SE Asia)

We boarded the Taco Shack boat and Lydia helped us get through getting our gear ready. Marte and I were pretty on top of it though and were able to do a majority of it without help.

We set course to Mango Bay and on the way Franko went over everything we were going to do today… and it was a lot.

We were going to do skills again, this time at a deeper depth. These skills included buddy assisted emergency ascents, self emergency ascents, diving without a mask and swimming (yeah…), and a refresher of all the skills from the day before.

We also learned how to fall backwards into the water from the boat instead of taking one big step.

We started with the refresher and dove right into filling our masks with water and blowing the water out. For whatever reason, my heart rate surged and I was immediately having trouble controlling my breath… this obviously was not a pleasant feeling but as I was going through this I looked over and Marte was too!

Marte acted first though and called Franko over saying she was having a bit of panic. He acted quickly and helped her slow her breathing down. Seeing this actually helped me out a ton and I realized, I wasn’t in this alone and I just needed to focus on taking deep breaths and everything would be okay.

After that it was smooth sailing! … or diving.

Our other skills were pieces of cake until we got to diving without a mask. This was intense and Franko encouraged us to keep our eyes open, in the salt water.

Now he did say it wouldn’t sting until the mask was back on our face without water, and that was true. But after the mild freak out I was worried that panic would rise again. But actually it didn’t!

I think it actually prepared me very well for this exercise and I was VERY relieved to have my goggles back on after the short swim.

Franko was very proud and impressed, so we continued on with our dive after the skills. In total (skills + diving) we were under water for 53 minutes and went to a depth of 11m! I found my buoyancy SO much easier this time around and my air consumption was much better. We saw so many beautiful fish and even swam through some submerged boxes, which felt pretty dang cool.

The course book talks about how diving should feel like you’re floating through space… and I really felt that this time! I even had less weights on than the previous day too!

I was pretty ecstatic after finishing this dive! It was pretty crazy how much improvement I felt from day 1 to now and also how deep we were already going! And we hadn’t even been as deep as we were going to go today!

We grabbed some snacks and popped up to the top deck of the boat to talk about how this dive went and the plan for the next dive.

Our next dive was at White Rock! This dive was actually going to be lead by our DMT, Lydia, and it was her first time ever leading. We were also going to descend about 17m without a rope to guide us down. I had been experiencing a bit of problems with equalizing my left ear but I was taking it slow and was able to make it work.

This dive was a breathtaking 37 minutes! We logged that we went to 17m… butttt we may have accidentally gotten close to 19m (don’t tell SSI).

On this dive we saw large schools of fish, angel fish, different types of groupers and tunas, needle fish, clown fish in sea anemones, the list goes on! We even saw a spotted stingray hiding out in a cave of coral, it was huge!

The dive traversed some amazing coral structures and we got to dive up and down them, changing elevation constantly through the dive. Franko even took off another weight from me and I was back to the original starting point of 4. I think we’ll take one more off tomorrow and see how I do!

The dive was shorter because the further down you are the faster the air is used. But my air consumption was still getting better. In this dive, Marte and I made a conscious effort to stick by each other and make sure we were both doing okay! Obviously our instructors were checking in too, but we wanted to practice what it’d be like diving with just a buddy.

We resurfaced after an incredible dive, packed up our gear, and headed to the top deck to talk about our dive and also run through a book of fish to figure out what we saw!

As we made our way back, Franko told us about an opportunity on our dives tomorrow for Marte and I. Tomorrow, one of our dives would be around a shipwreck. Now, with open water, you can only get to around 27m… but to go inside the shipwreck you need to be able to go down to 30m.

One of the only ways to do this is to get your advanced diving certification. But Marte doesn’t have time for that, so Franko suggested a cost effective way to get certified at 30m. There’s a diving specialty certification for this which only cost around 2300 Baht.

But… since I was already planning on doing my advance after day one, I just purchased that and that would allow me to dive to 30m tomorrow anyways… which was 9500 Baht. SO, I’ll have two days in the near future that will get me to the next level of diving! I’ve truly loved it very much so far.

We arrived at the pier and made our way back to the hostel. I showered, ate, and while I ate I started working on my last few sections of reading and quizzes. Marte and I needed to finish all the reading, quizzes, and final test by tomorrow. Because after tomorrow’s dive, we’ll be officially certified divers!

While eating my chicken quesadilla, a traveler from Italy, Thomas (who just started their first day of diving today, started chatting with me… I did chat with him but I cut it short to work on my homework, which I felt bad about. But I needed to do it.

I went back to my room where it took me around 30-45 minutes to finish three chapters, three quizzes, and the final exam.

With that, I just need to finish my dives tomorrow and I’ll have completed my open water certification!

I then spent the night at the hostel… but it was VERY slow so I just ended up playing pool with a couple travelers and my coworkers. Eventually my manager, Yi, told me that karaoke wasn’t happening tonight 😦 and I could go about my night.

Coincidentally, my dive instructor, Franko, was playing in his band at a nearby bar! I saw him a couple of weeks ago and his band plays AMAZING Latino music. I got there around 9pm when they were supposed to start… but something delayed them till closer to 10pm!

They did start playing eventually and it was a beautiful night of swinging our hips. My friend Holly joined me and I ran into a friend Travis at the bar. Marte and a few of her friends came later and we all had a blast dancing the night away!

During the performance, Franko and the lead singer would quip back and forth at each other in spanish. But at one point, Franko looked at me and did one of these quips… but said, “Elie you need to go to bed, you have to dive early in the morning tomorrow but you are going to finish your open water certification.” And then went straight back into singing and lauding the congas.

This was hilarious and just made the night even better! Also I don’t think anyone else understood what he said.

I went back around 11pm and Marte and I got snacks for our early morning.

Tomorrow, we dive at 6:45am! So I went to bed with a lot of excitement, nerves, and anticipation for tomorrow’s adventure!

– Elie