Day 169! Today is another double boat filled with fun dives and course assisting. We are going to a lot of the same dive sites, but each time is a different experience. It’s really crazy to see in person, but I was able to get a picture of the giant puffer fish I saw the other day!

After a nice night of relaxing on the boat, it was time to jump back in the ocean!

Today was another double boat day, so 4 more dives to add to the log book. It’s pretty crazy to say, but I’m closing in on my 40th dive! Which means I’m officially starting my Dive Master training soon.

We started our day with the classic fried chicken lady. It’s always a great way to start the day.

The morning dives today were Kit and I with Lydia guiding us. We started the day at Southwest Pinnacle where we were met again with a spectacular sight.

It wasn’t as crazy as the night before, but this dive site is insanely cool. The fish are in massive schools of fish, there’s always so much action happening… and we even saw a tiny jelly fish that had an even smaller fish inside of it!

After a cool 36 minute dive at a max depth of 18.9m, we made our way to the next dive site. The next dive sight was HTMS Sattakut, the shipwreck I’ve been to the most.

There were a couple pro divers (Dive Masters) who had rented out a couple air tanks on the boat. One of them didn’t want to dive, so the other one joined us. She had a GoPro and filmed some of the dive and I’m really glad she did because we saw some super cool sea life.

At the beginning of the dive we went almost to 30 meters to look at the bottom of the shipwreck. We saw a GINORMOUS Jenkins stingray and right next to it was a cute, baby blue spotted stingray. Unfortunately she didn’t send us this video.

We also saw some ginormous fish hiding around the bottom of the wreck… and then, as we started to crest over the top of the wreck, we saw the giant puffer fish again!!

I’m really excited that I can share what it looks like! It’s so freaking cool how big it is and that it’s taken up residency at the shipwreck.

The dive was 37 minutes and we reached a depth of 29.7m. We spent a lot of time down at the deepest part which was really cool to spend more time down there.

We rushed back to the hostel, where we were served our lunch, since we were on the afternoon boat as well.

It was massaman curry day, and Taco Shack makes a great masaman curry. However, I was assisting a course on the Dive Point boat again, and had to leave almost immediately for the boat since we had a 12:30pm departure time.

Before I left, my DMT instructor, Chris, had his birthday today. And one of my fellow DMTs brought him a cake. So we shared that before heading out for dives number 3 and 4 of the day.

Our first of the afternoon dives was at Japanese Gardens. Here we were teaching an advanced course how to navigate. Guada was the instructor I was assisting and I was excited to finally assist her since she’s in our friend group.

We had two of the four divers navigate us around the dive site for 51 minutes. I just hung out at the back of the group making sure nothing went wrong and working on my buoyancy and air consumption.

Our second dive, unfortunately… was also at Japanese Gardens. I’m glad we still got to dive, but the waves were getting so bad it didn’t make sense for the boat to move from where we were already. So instead of doing perfect buoyancy somewhere else, we would be doing it at Japanese Gardens again.

This, usually, very straight forward lesson, went crazy quickly. First off, the visibility wasn’t great, then we were next to a cleaner wrasse station, which was harassing some of the divers… but it was cool to see fish come to get cleaned off. On top of that, a current started sweeping through, which made some of the exercises quite hard for the new divers.

I was also holding a flotation device that marks where we are diving at shallower water. This was dragging me around too making it a bit harder for me to practice my buoyancy. After 43 minutes, we called it quits and the divers smashed their buoyancy, even with the craziness.

Also during this dive, I saw a tiny crustacean (looked like a miniature crab, helping another tiny fish make their hole bigger. It was very cute.

We made our way back to the dock, but the waves were insane. I rarely get sea sick… and I was starting to feel queasy. Especially when we got stuck outside of the port because the waves wouldn’t let us get in the dock.

We were stuck on the boat for easily an extra 30 minutes if not more.

When I got back to Taco, I was craving food. So I ordered a quesadilla and then joined my friends and fellow divers to a birthday party for our mentor/instructor, Chris!

We had a very fun celebration and then I went to bed on the earlier side… but felt asleep while writing my blog post for the day prior. Diving is exhausting work!

– Elie