Day 166! Wow… today was a long day. This post is probably going to be really long too. BUT, it’s going to be jam packed with how my 5 dives in one day went! Here’s the story of my first triple boat experience.

Good morning Taco Shack!

I woke up nice and early… today was going to be a big day, my first day where I’d be diving on all three boats of the day. I’ll probably be talking about double boating a lot over the next two months, but every now and then a triple boat will be thrown in the mix.

Just like every other morning, we met up in the lobby of Taco Shack to load our gear onto the taxi and head to the pier.

To start this morning, I’d be joining my fellow Dive Master in Training (DMT), Lydia. Lydia is at a point in her training where she’s finishing up learning how to navigate and will probably start navigating clients soon. Today was her first time navigating without an instructor, so she was a bit nervous. I was excited to dive with her and see how it went, because for me, it was basically a private dive!

I munched on some fried chicken, from the pier’s fried chicken lady, and got ready for the long day of dives.

Today though, I tied my fried chicken up high and the ants didn’t get to it this time! We’re now ants 1 – Elie 1.

Dive one of five was at Southwest Pinnacle. Luckily for Lydia, this was one of the smaller dive sites, so it was easier to navigate. During dives I try to make markers for myself in my head to help for when it comes time for me to do more navigation too! Since this was my 4th time at this dive site, I was starting to get accustomed to it.

We geared up and dove in on our first dive of the day.

We had a bit of a swim to our buoy and the water was choppy… which made for a tough start. But the water below was very clear and the visibility was great again!

We swam around the pinnacle and spent a bunch of time around the giant school of fusiliers that have taken up residency at the pinnacle. It’s amazing watching them move back and forth, open and close for divers swimming into their masses, and seeing the stream of them from above was incredible.

Near the beginning of our dive, Lydia was busy focusing on navigating. I quickly tried to get her attention and thankfully she turned around because I spotted a baby blue spotted stingray hiding under a rock. It was super cute and I wish I had a picture to share, but it was tiny!

We also bumped into our fellow DMT’s groups while diving around. It’s always fun when this happens because we’ll either wave, point something out, or throw up some obscene hand sign or motion to make each other laugh. There’s some great camaraderie in our group!

Our first dive lasted 31 minutes and we hit a depth of 24.7m. We came up on the wrong buoy, but thankfully there are only two so we were not that far off from the boat!

With that, I had another successful Southwest Pinnacle dive and that completed dive 1 of 5 of the day!

The second dive of the morning was still just Lydia and I! This ramped up the navigation challenge for her as we were diving at White Rock, one of my favorite dive sites so far.

These were the exact same two dive spots as the day prior, but I was excited to do them still since (apparently) Southwest Pinnacle is a little less common of a dive spot.

White Rock today was almost as good as the day prior! It was a wonderful dive as we navigated through the various rock/coral formations and the giant coral field in the middle of the dive site. We got to the southern bit and got a tiny bit lost… we could have gone back the way we came, but we wanted to continue circling the dive site.

Luckily, one of the instructors groups, Guada’s, was nearby and gave us a little hint on where we needed to go. We finished the dive after 44 minutes at a max depth of 15.8 meters! A much better air consumption on this dive.

We saw some big trigger fish, a very territorial fish and lots of pretty coral. Unfortunately, White Rock is being affected by the heat and the coral is bleaching. It’s still pretty, but sad to see.

The morning ended and we headed back to Taco Shack for lunch. I was pretty tired already, but excited to do more diving. And once I started eating, I realized how hungry I was.

For my afternoon dives, I was assisting my friend, and former advanced instructor, Theo! He was teaching an advanced course and I’d be tagging along to help out and run through the basics again. I was looking forward to working with another group of divers and getting to rehash skills I learned a week or two ago!

For these dives, we actually weren’t on the Taco Shack boat. Our boat is on the smaller side (for now, there’s a new one coming soon), which means it sometimes gets booked up. But there are other schools with larger boats and we rent our spaces from them for the overflow.

Today’s overflow was on a boat called Dive Point. This boat was massive and very nice on the inside. There was so much space to get ready and all their air tanks had at least 200 bar of air, it was incredible!

We had an awesome group of divers in this advanced course. Murphy who was from Chicago, David from Canada, Pippa from the UK, and Jasmine from Australia. Most of them had taken their advanced with Theo as well, so they knew each other already which made for a fun learning environment.

Our first dive was at a site I hadn’t been to since my open water, Japanese Gardens.

At this dive site we did the advanced navigation introduction. Each of the divers took turns navigating us to different parts of the dive site. The visibility wasn’t great, so it was a big challenge for them, but they all did very good.

My responsibility was to stick behind the group and act as the sheep herder. A couple times I had to swim up to someone and remind them to stick with their buddy or to make sure they were okay. I also put a lot of emphasis on myself to practice my air control and slow down my breath to use less air.

After 47 minutes of cruising around the dive site, we came back up to the surface and headed back to the boat. We started the dive around 14.7m but averaged around 7m throughout the dive. It’s always good to practice the skills shallower just in case something were to go wrong.

The second dive was at the Twins Koh Tao dive site. However, we didn’t really go explore the dive site. Instead we ventured off to a sandy patch to practice the diver’s buoyancy, the second skill of the advanced course. The skills in this part of the course were some that I struggled with during the practice, but even over the past week I have already seen so much improvement in my buoyancy and frog kicking.

We spent OVER AN HOUR under the water practicing different buoyancy skills. At the start we practiced frog kicking in a circle while maintaining our buoyancy, this was pretty tiring but I joined the fun and impressed myself with where my buoyancy and frog kicking is at.

We also brought out the square PVC with us, but the visibility was pretty bad, so we weren’t exactly sure where we put it. Theo told me to watch the buoyancy practice for a second to grab the PVC and it was pretty crazy having to watch everyone at once… I have no clue how the instructors do it every day!

But a minute later he was back and we were ready for the next part of the lesson.

Here the divers had to practice keeping their buoyancy through the square. Going forwards, going backwards, and, Theo did it again, made them do a flip up, over, and back through the square.

I joined in on a couple of the exercises but I also hung out practicing my breathing and maintaining my buoyancy on the side.

We came up after 67 minutes, which was crazy! We were only at 10 meters, so we weren’t burning through our air that fast. But with all the moving around we were doing Theo was very impressed with everyone’s air consumption. Usually we wouldn’t go past 50/55 minutes, but we wanted to get through everything.

The afternoon dives were complete… but the day wasn’t over yet. We got back on the boat and packed up our gear because we needed to switch over to the Taco Shack boat for our night dive!!

But before that, there was about an hour break to get food and chat with the instructors and other DMTs.

We were all very tired but had one more dive to get through before we could call it a day.

It’s pretty crazy the intensity switch from volunteering to dive master. I very much welcome the change pace and even with being exhausted, I was really enjoying my day!

We set back off to the pier and made our way back to White Rock for my second ever night dive!

We were met with a super pretty sunset as we got ready for our dive. The sun went down and we got out our torches and jumped into the dark water… which unfortunately had very poor visibility.

This made our descent feel like it was out of a mission impossible movie or a video game. All we could really see were the flashlights of our dive group and a bit of an outline of the people nearby. But as we descended further and further the visibility started to get much better, not great, but we could at least see each other.

We dove around this dive site and it was sooo cool seeing it at night. Right away we were met with a blue spotted stingray who was fluttering around the ocean floor. We actually ended up seeing three of them throughout the dive! We also saw some ginormous groupers who were out on the hunt for fish… I’m talking BIG groupers, much bigger than I had seen so far.

They actually used our lights for a bit to assist their hunt and they followed us around for a few minutes before skirting off.

Halfway through the dive, we found a sandy spot, descended to our knees, and put our flashlights into our chest. We then started goofily waving our hands into the water… and lo and behold, we saw bioluminescent plankton!! I’ve heard stories about them being in Thailand’s oceans, but had never seen it myself! It wasn’t a flash of blue like I’ve seen in videos (probably because it wasn’t super dense with them) but they were lighting up like tiny fireflies! It was so freaking cool and also made me laugh watching everyone flail their hands around to see them glow.

We ended the dive after 42 minutes, with a max depth of 17m, and an average depth of 13m! Another very impressive and fun dive! All the advanced divers were smiling ear to ear, so was I! But I was definitely crashing hard as the exhaustion was setting in.

We took a nice boat ride back to the pier and we set up our gear for the next day… quickly to realize we were going to be on the dive point boat again. So Theo and I scrambled to pack all the students gear and have it ready in their bags for them when we arrived at the pier.

We went back to Taco, stored our bags, and then I quickly went to a convenience store, grabbed some electrolytes and a couple snacks, and then passed out before I could write my blog post!

It was a long day… but I had an absolute BLAST! I added 5 more amazing dives to my log book and now I’m at 26 dives! It’s pretty crazy because just 10 days ago I was at 11 dives. Soon I’ll be at 30 and quickly after that I’ll be at 40 dives and the official DM fun begins!

Tomorrow I have to wake up early for the last morning dives of this advanced course. But, I have the afternoon off so I’ll be taking a nice and long nap (much longer than my usual 26 minute Power Nap).

I’m very addicted to diving now and it’s pretty incredible I’m getting to do it so often. I do definitely need to take a breather soon though and let my body recover. But that’ll be soon enough!

– Elie