Day 174! I’m not sure what happened with the weather, but it’s flopped from sunny blue skies to windy and rainy. Hopefully it will go away soon so we can get back to relaxing in the sunshine. Almost caught up on posts! One more to go 🙂

After a late night out, I was able to have a later start to the day as I didn’t have to dive until the afternoon boat!

But part of our new expectations is either at 9am sit in on a diving classroom, or at 10:30am be in the dive equipment room ready to help set up for the day.

I chose the later so I could sleep in a little and grabbed a muesli bowl to kickstart my day.

It was a hectic day of diving with 10 different groups going out in the afternoon. There were 5 groups using the Taco boat and 5 groups renting out space on the Dive Point boat.

There was a lot of stress in the air since we didn’t have enough equipment for all of the divers. But we ended up figuring it all out and renting equipment from the Dive Point boat as well.

After the rush, it was time for lunch. I had a tofu and green bean dish with rice.

It wasn’t anything crazy but it was free so that’s always nice!

Our afternoon of diving was day two of the open water course. Day two consists of more skills that go over a review of day one, emergency assents, and a few more fun exercises.

I had a lot more of a hands on role today as Hector had a lot to go through and with 4 students, it could take a while. This meant I was helping ensure the students ascended slowly, were always breathing out and not holding their breath, and of course, keeping them “in line.”

Our first dive was a long one. We spent 83 minutes at around 5 meters working on the skills. It was a long dive, but the students had a good time learning and then enjoying a short fun dive back to the boat. Hector was happy to have me around and told me I did a good job at assisting.

Chris also told me later in the day that he heard that I “killed it” at explaining the gear setup, which was nice to hear!

The second dive was another fun dive at Lighthouse Pinnacle. This was my first dive at this dive site, but I had encountered Taco’s boat here a couple weeks ago when I hiked to the light house.

We spent 46 minutes diving around the dive site… with some very bad visibility. It wasn’t Aow Mao bad, but still wasn’t great. There also was a decent amount of current pushing us all around. One special thing we did see was a juvenile sweet lips, which apparently is rare to find.

The dive in the end was more of a buoyancy challenge than spotting cool fish, but I think the students still enjoyed being under the sea. We also dove to almost 17m, which is still so cool that you can go from just learning to depth so quick!

On our way back to Taco Shack, it started to POUR down rain.

We were all soaked and then had to wait for the taxi to come pick us up, in the rain. There wasn’t enough room for the DMs and instructors, so we had to wait even longer in the rain.

I then went and picked up my scooter from the other pier, ran to the pharmacy, and took a nice cold shower.

My left eye had been super dry and gunky all day and the instructors thought I might be getting an eye infection. So I got some eyedrops for it to help it out.

After my shower, I went and had dinner at Mamas. I was craving their fried chicken! I was originally planning on having takeaway, but a couple of the open water students were there and I joined them for dinner.

After dinner, I promptly went back to my room and passed out. It had been a shivery afternoon with all the rain and I was ready to catch up on some sleep!

– Elie