Day 183! Lots of course assisting today! Part of being a Dive Master is taking over some of the responsibilities for the instructor… and today that included leading one of Hectors morning dives! I was a bit nervous but excited to take on the challenge.

My alarm went off at 6am, which meant it was time for another morning of diving! Today, I’d be finishing off assisting Hector’s open water group and then in the afternoon, I’d start assisting Chris’s open water group.

I went to the mini mart next to my apartment and grabbed a donut and a hydration drink. I knew it was going to be another long and fun day, so I wanted to stay hydrated.

For the first morning dive, we started off at No Name Pinnacle. The fun twist to this dive was that I was going to be leading it! This was my first morning dive lead, but after leading Tanote Bay the day before, I was feeling good.

We geared up and jumped into the water. We immediately looked down and had perfect visibility! We could see at least 25m from the surface to the bottom of the ocean, it was beautiful.

Good visibility meant it’d be an easier time navigating and also meant we’d be able to see the shipwreck nearby. Since an open water diver can only go to 18m, we wouldn’t be able to really see the wreck if it was a bad visibility day.

We dropped down and started our dive with me in the lead. We worked our way from the pinnacle to the shipwreck and then around a bit of area where there could’ve been a lot of barracudas… but there weren’t any. So we made our way back to the pinnacle and circled it till the end.

Throughout the dive, I checked in on the divers, asked for their air levels, made sure they were staying together and at my level, and pointing out cool fish too. It was a blast!

The dive lasted around 34 minutes. I had some help from Hector of course, but I felt like I did a good job navigating and felt confident in my skills. I’m looking forward to getting even better at navigating and feeling fully confident to navigate any dive site. But this will take some time!

Our second dive of the morning was to White Rock. I wasn’t too upset to be going again because White Rock is one of my favorite dive sites! The visibility here was insane as well and it really felt like I was swimming in an aquarium.

Hector took the lead back on this dive and I got to follow in the rear and make sure the group stayed together. On the dive, we found a white eyed moray eel peaking out of some coral, it was very cool! We saw the giant grouper I saw the night before as well, this time it wasn’t hunting.

At the end of the 50 minute dive, a very large long face fish swam up to me, kind of half circled me while eyeing me, and then swam off. It was really cool and I didn’t think much of it till a dive later in the day…

With those two dives done, we had 3 more open water certified divers on our hands! They were all super excited to have completed the course and all loved the morning dives. It’s really cool seeing how excited they are for these dives, especially because of how routine they have started getting for me.

After getting back to Taco Shack, it was time to scarf down lunch! I had 2 more dives to do today and I had to stay alert since I was assisting more.

It was massaman curry day and it was especially good today.

This was my first time assisting Chris, and every instructor wants their dive masters to do something different. So we went over his expectations for me. Also, since he’s my mentor, I knew he’d be critiquing me and would be a little more nitpicky.

To start out, I gave our new divers the boat briefing. This is explaining how to act on the boat, where to put things, where things are, etc. After that, I led our group through setting up their equipment!

We have a really fun and cute group for the next couple of days. They are all so excited, supportive of each other, and actively making sure each other are all okay. They also didn’t know each other until today!

We got to Mango Bay and I taught them how to properly get into the water. And then we made our way to a shallow sandy area for exercises. Today I was just mirroring Chris. He wants me to get as good, professional, and concise as I can with the underwater skills since I’ll need to teach them in refresher courses soon enough!

After the skills were done, we went on a little fun dive around the rest of the bay. In total, we spent 63 minutes under the water!

I then explained to the group how to properly get back onto the boat and how to switch tanks.

The next thing I taught was our buddy check. And then I taught them another method of entering the water. The first one was one big step forward, the second is entering backwards, which they all really enjoyed the second one.

The second dive was at Twins, which is a very beautiful dive site that I haven’t been to a ton yet. It was a really busy day at the dive site too!

I taught the students how to do a controlled descent while holding the buoy line. We made our way down the line slowly and every meter I made sure they could equalize and they were all okay. Once we got to 7m, we let go of the line, Chris took over, and we enjoyed another beautiful dive!

There were a number of beautiful fish on this dive and I even spotted a blue spotted stingray, but we didn’t have time to show the students. I also, for the first time, saw a six banded angel fish. They were massive and super beautiful.

This ended up being a 40 minute dive and I had one of the best air consumptions I have ever had. For this dive I tried using 2 weights instead of 3 and it worked really well. Now that I’m feeling more confident as a diver, I’ll be working on bettering my air consumption and buoyancy which can be greatly affected by the extra weight we carry.

The extra weight is mainly for the initial descent, but some divers don’t even need any. From what I’ve talked about with my instructors, no weight or one weight is eventually the goal in Koh Tao diving.

With that, I hit 65 total dives! Soon to be 70!?

I got back to Taco Shack, went home to shower, and then went back to Taco for another amazing chicken quesadilla… I don’t think I can ever get tired of these, especially for 80 Baht!

I hung out in my room for a while watching tv on my phone. I needed some time to recharge my social battery. But my friend Pauline asked if I wanted to hang out with her, her friend James, and some other people I know from Echo hostel, and I decided to be social!

Originally I was supposed to be double boating again tomorrow, but I was taken off of the morning boat because it was too full.

So I hung out for a couple hours playing pool and chatting with my friends before calling it a night!

It’s really nice having another hostel to hang out with and a friend group outside of the Taco Shack squad. I love everyone at Taco, but sometimes it’s nice to have other groups to hang out with, especially if they’re all staying “long term” on the island.

More diving tomorrow! And hopefully… some GoPro pictures 🙂

– Elie