Day 170! Phew… all caught up! I’ve been so tired lately that I’ve been falling behind on my daily blogs. But I think I’ve got back in the rhythm, until I miss a day again. But as I said in Vietnam, if I miss a day, eventually you’ll get two posts in one day! Today was freaking awesome, enjoy.

Today was an exciting day! I was starting my first certification that comes with my Dive Master course.

Today’s lesson was all about navigation. But before diving in, I got myself a muesli bowl, which I haven’t had in a while since I’ve been diving every morning.

It was a nice way to start my day, however I had to finish most of it in class because it started at 9am.

We sat in the classroom across the street and listened to the diving manager, Iris, tell us all about navigation. We discussed using a compass, natural landmarks, and even how to use current to your advantage. This class really intrigued me. I’ve already really enjoyed the challenges I’ve been put in navigation wise, it’s like a puzzle… so I was very excited to dive deeper.

After the classroom portion, we went to the top of Taco Shack and ran through some exercises on using the compass as we would be using it in the water later in the day.

We learned how to navigate in a triangle and a square by using the number of kicks and rotating the compass specific degrees. It was pretty cool!

We ate lunch and then took these skills to the ocean!

I think there’ll be pictures and videos to come from this, because Iris was filming us for a lot of it. But the first dive site was Aow Leuk, one of my favorite beaches on the island.

Here we split into two pairs, Lydia and I were a pair and Kit and Ami were a pair as well. We took turns navigating and kick counting, making both shapes and trying to find specific items or landmarks again. It was a really good feeling when we got it exactly right! It was challenging and a lot to think about under water, but we stayed calm, cool, and collected even when we messed up.

At the beginning of the dive, we accidentally disturbed a small and camouflaged Jenkins stingray. It was super cool to see it pop out from no where and flutter off.

Our second dive was a secret until we got back on the boat. We had technically finished our navigation certification already, but Iris apparently has a record of taking the task up a notch and challenging us on the second dive.

For our second dive, we were going to a dive site none of us were very familiar with and we had to navigate to a shipwreck we had never been to either. We were allowed to chat about our plan prior to the dive but once we started we obviously couldn’t communicate very effectively.

We sat around the dive book, but there wasn’t any information on the shipwreck. So we asked the captain where it was and also two of the diving instructors on the boat if they knew where it was.

Thankfully, there was a buoy line off of the wreck. But we weren’t attached to it, so we had to ready our compasses, orient ourselves and hope we went in the right direction towards it.

On top of that, to make it even harder, we were all attempting our first negative descent. Usually when you enter the water, you make yourself positively buoyant (using the BC) and then wait for the rest of the dive to get into the water. But a negative descent is when you jump into the water but you don’t resurface and you meet at 5 meters below the water.

Usually you do this to avoid fighting a current at the start of a dive. But this was just another trick Iris had to make communication just a bit harder.

We all successfully did the descent (which looked and felt very cool) and then made our way toward where we hoped the shipwreck would be.

After a couple minutes, the visibility became absolutely terrible. Probably the worst I’ve seen since I’ve started diving. I could barely see a foot or two in front of me. There was one point where Kit and I almost lost Ami (who was leading us) because her fin got swallowed up by the murkiness. Luckily I saw it last minute though.

We dove and dove and eventually ran right into the shop and its buoy line. It was a really rewarding feeling actually finding the boat and knowing we navigated it correctly. But because of the murkiness, the boat was hard to see.

The boat was also very eerie. Maybe it was the visibility, but it was a bit ominous and creepy. We did see some huge bat fish and a baby bannerfish. Not a ton of wildlife, but this was mainly about navigation. The boat also had a mast still attached to it, which none of the other shipwrecks have and was very cool to see.

We then attempted to find the city of artificial reef cubes that this dive site has to offer. But we very much missed it and decided to go up instead since I was getting lower on air.

Even though the entire dive was terrible visibility, we were still able to find the ship. On top of that, Iris and Guada were with us the entire time, so we were going to be okay.

We finished up the dive and made our way back to Taco Shack. But we went to a different pier than our bikes so we had to take the taxi back to Taco and then the other pier.

While we waited for the taxi there was samosa guy hanging around the pier. So I got some fantastic samosas as a snack.

There wasn’t any room in the taxi because of this… so we embraced our inner mad max fury road (or inner south East Asian) and road the top of the taxi.

It was quite the thrill and a bit anticlimactic. But we made it in one piece and got our motorbikes.

My friend Ami is finishing up her DMT tomorrow so we went and celebrated early at a restaurant called Bingos.

We had a nice group eating diner, Lydia, Ami. Pi, Kit, Till, Lina, and Jos.

I got a very Thai dish called, Lab. I hadn’t had this since Bangkok with Nico and I was excited to try it again.

It was really good and nice that it was able to be chicken.

Today was a very accomplishing day. I was really happy to be back in a classroom setting and learning from someone. It’s been a lot of self learning and chatting with others for some advice. I’ll be looking forward to the next specialty on the list!

– Elie