Day 189! Well today’s the day! The first day I’ve done a dive with just my dive buddy and no instructor. It’s a big step in my diving process and it ended up being a couple incredible dives! There’s some cool dive photos as well with this one!

We’re back to 6am wake-up’s at Taco Shack. We now have a rental boat that leaves when we want it to, so we’ve started leaving at 6:50am again.

Today, Kit and I were joining Chris on two morning dives where we’d each be leading the dive (without Chris’s help). This was our last step to diving without an instructor and to continue our progression on learning to navigate better. Eventually we will be leading fun divers, so over the next couple of weeks Kit and I will just dive the two of us to learn the sites and learn from “getting lost.”

Our first dive was to… Chumphon. I’d be getting another crack at this site after whatever anxiety came over me a few days earlier.

And, I was leading it!

I prepared a drawing of the dive site on my diving slate, drew a route on the dive site to mark where we wanted to go, and then it was go time to execute the plan!

We descended down to 30 meters pretty much instantly, which I didn’t realize was my first mistake (we’ll get back to that in a bit). We then made our way towards a point called barracuda rock and ran into a massive school of fish… I’m talking thousands on thousands. I came through them and almost hit a wall so I turned, but the wrong direction missing the barracuda rock.

This wasn’t the end of the world since we got more time with the school of fish. But then when we came back towards Chumphon Pinnacle, I turned back towards the way we came.

Chris quickly noticed and told me to head through a cut through that would allegedly lead us to the west side of the dive site (the side I originally wanted). But turns out, the cut through wasn’t the one Chris thought it was either.

I was surprised he told me to go through it because this valley of the pinnacle was TIGHT. I got to the exit and wasn’t able to fit through the first time I tried, so I lowered myself all the way to the bottom and squeezed through… what a relief.

We the realized where we were and started ascending to shallower depths… because we had spent too long around 30m. This is because I should’ve started towards barracuda rock at the start rather than dropping to 30m right away. This causes us (especially me) to run through my air because at 30m it goes wayyy faster (double as fast as at 10m).

So we slowly ascended more and more and then finished off the dive by circling a bit of the southern pinnacle. We made our way up for our safety stop and back to the boat… even with the dive not going to plan, at least I found the boat!

This is all a part of the learning process and I now know for next time!

(I have no pictures from this dive because I was focused on navigating)

The second dive was to HTMS Sattakut, one of the many shipwrecks around the island.

This time it was Kit’s turn to navigate, so I assumed the roll of photographer again.

My air consumption was much better this time, even though we went to the same depth. But this time all I had to do was focus on it.

This dive was actually a blast as Chris is a very fun person to dive with. He loves blowing bubble rings and goofing around a bit under water. I laughed a fair amount on this dive!

We also saw a school of yellow tailed barracuda and of course the giant shipwreck!

It was a very nice and peaceful 48 minute dive.

We headed back to Taco Shack, where initially I was planning on a nice afternoon nap. But… in the morning Kit and I decided to dive in the afternoon, just the two of us. So it was basically time to get right back on the boat after enjoying a chicken fried rice.

The afternoon dives were on the Dive Point boat. This was going to be Kit and my first time diving just the two of us and we were both very excited! Kit… was excited, but just decided to look grumpy in this picture for some reason.

Our first dive wasn’t the most exciting one. It was at Mango Bay. This dive site is mainly used for skills since it has a lot of sandy area and is very shallow.

We ventured off into an area we had never dove at in this dive site before and quickly found out why we had never been over here.

Out of no where a trigger fish attacked us! Trigger fish are a very big and territorial fish, that when you encroach on them or their nest, they get very feisty. But this one came out of nowhere!

We turned around just in time for it to bite my fin, thankfully not my leg… these guys have a fin that pops up to show it’s not happy with you before it attacks, but somehow we missed the fish all together!

We swam away and it let us be, but it did give us a startle! We were super confused where it came from… but the fun wasn’t over yet. We were making our way to a sandy patch to practice some bubble rings and out of nowhere the trigger fish came back!

We thought we made a wide enough route but apparently not. This time it was after Kit and it didn’t let off the chase as easily. We swam away for at least a minute before it gave up… it was quite a feisty fellow. After we got away, we surfaced (we were 3m under the water) and had a solid laugh about what just happened. It was quite bizarre.

(We later found out those trigger fish nest over there and it’s a solid spot to not go to)

We then found a sandy patch to spend the rest of the dive at practicing our buoyancy, perfecting our bubble rings, and making each other laugh under the water. Not the most insane dive, but we navigated back to the boat to get ready for our next dive.

This one was going to be a lot more eventful!

Our second dive was going to be a drop off! The boat was heading to a dive site called Japanese Gardens. But on the way, there’s a dive site called Red Rock! The plan was to drop off at Red Rock and then dive all the way to Japanese Gardens and meet back up with the boat.

For our first real dive just the two of us, we were pretty pumped for this adventure. We jumped off the boat and descended next to the giant red rock.

We made our way down a wall that led from the dive site to Japanese Gardens and saw a lot of beautiful rock structures. Around this area are a lot of caves to explore but neither of us really wanted to do that this time around… especially since we didn’t know exactly how long it’d take us to get to the second dive site anddd how much air.

So we followed along for a while and I whipped out my torch here and there to spot wildlife under the darkness of corals.

We spotted two moray eels, a small and big puffer fish, andddd a lot of freaking trigger fish again! I think we saw 5 Titan trigger fish throughout this dive. Thankfully we had plenty of space so they wouldn’t mess with us.

Over the course of the next 46 minutes, we made our way all the way from one dive site to the next and successfully found the second dive site! It was a really cool and surreal experience just diving with Kit. We were constantly checking in on each other, pointing out cool things, and making sure that we were heading the correct way.

At one point on the dive, a solo diver doing a side mount tank set up came zooming by us out of no where… it took us by surprise and he didn’t even spare us a glance… I guess he was on a mission!

We surfaced a bit away from the boat, but in the general area since we didn’t see exactly where the boat moored up. But we were both ecstatic about completing the dive and exhausted.

Tomorrow we’ll be diving just the two of us at even bigger and prettier dive locations in the morning!! I’m very excited to see how they go!

We got back to Taco Shack and I was veryyyy hungry. But I went back home first to shower and then headed back to eat.

I devoured a ginormous chicken quesadilla and then immediately headed back to my room to lie down in the AC and have a very early night’s sleep.

Today was a big step in my dive master journey. We’ve hit a milestone where we’re competent divers who can semi-navigate and be okay with getting a little turned around. We obviously have a lot to learn and figure out, but it’ll be the Kit and Elie show for a while as we try to figure it out together!

Here’s to some fun dives tomorrow morning!

– Elie