Day 192! Words cannot accurately describe the crazy day of diving I had. But I’m sure going to try in this post! Not only was today my day to get certified to dive to 40m whenever I want, but also was the luckiest dive of my life (so far). The title of course gives it away, but the beautiful creature we saw while descending today took the cake for the most majestic diving experience ever…

I’ve started feeling a bit under the weather again unfortunately, but that wasn’t going to stop me from diving today!

Today was a big day for my diving training, we were taking our diving to the maximum recreational depth of 40m. This requires a specialty certification and from now on I’ll be allowed to go anywhere from the surface to 40m as long as the dive site allows for it and if I want to!

So I woke up at 6am, took a nice steamy shower to air out my sinuses, and got ready for a crazy morning of diving!

Usually with specialties we have class in the morning. But because the deep dives happen in the morning, the boat was our classroom. We sat and listened to Chelsea talk to us about the challenges, risks, and how to plan for deep dives. The most important parts are making sure you have enough air for the dive, watching your air consumption since it’ll be far greater at depth, and to check your NDL (no decompression limit) constantly.

The NDL is the time limit you have at a specific depth before being in a decompression (deco) dive. This is another thing you need to be specialty trained for, otherwise your risk of decompression sickness sky rockets.

Our first dive was going to be a dive none of us would ever forget…

We were heading to Chumphon and our plan was to drop over barracuda rock, swim out to 40m, and then make our way back up slowly for the rest of the dive.

We were 4 boats behind the buoy and we ended up deciding to surface swim all the way to it. Then on the descent, Tom, an advanced diver joining the course, had troubles equalizing. So this made it take a little longer to descend down…

But thankfully this happened.

Everything had to line up perfectly and the universe was on our side. Because right as we descended to around 12m, Chelsea turns around and gives us the sign for whale shark. Kit and I of course thought she was joking… but out of nowhere I see a massive fish coming towards us and SURE ENOUGH, it was a freaking whale shark.

I was perplexed and instantly started fumbling for my GoPro (which I ALMOST didn’t bring since I knew at 40m, there wasn’t going to be much to film). I’m so happy I had it because this whale shark was swimming right towards us!

We were dropping as a group but in this moment I descended quickly down to 16m to get even closer to it and capture this video:

This baby whale shark was around 5-6m long (possibly more) and was only a meter below me, it was so majestic. You can hear in the video the sheer excitement from Chelsea and other divers around me, literally pure joy was radiating through the ocean.

Whale shark season is technically over but because of global warming, their migration patterns have been thrown off… and they’ve recently started popping up again around Koh Tao.

I’ve had it in my head that I wasn’t going to end up seeing any while in Koh Tao, so this truly was a special moment. So much so, some instructors have only seen a handful in their YEARS of diving in Koh Tao… some of the students who saw it today had only 5 dives under their belt, me just over 80! We all got so lucky with this.

Especially my group. Literally everything had to line up perfectly for this to happen, otherwise we would have missed it. We actually just descended onto the luckiest thing ever…

There was a split second where we all thought about chasing after it and saying “fuck it” to the deep dive… but I think we all were content with letting this magical moment be what it was and letting the whale shark go off on its own (now many other divers were following it, but we didn’t want to add to the horde).

It honestly took me the rest of the dive to rationalize what happened, but we had other matters at hand… diving to 40m!

With our dive now back on track, we continued our descent allll the way down to around 37m. It wasn’t exactly 40, but the visibility was really bad and our NDL’s were dropping quickly.

Being this deep was pretty dang cool. I’m not especially in the mindset of having to go deeper and deeper into the ocean, I’m very content with 30m and even 18m… I like finding the cool fish and corals, but this was a cool experience.

Literally cool as well, the temperature was drastically lower at depth and as we made our way back up, you could feel the temperature shift. The temperature dropped around 2 degrees Celsius from the beginning to 37m!

Also random, while we were down there, I found an UNO card… I’m assuming it was an instructor showing off color absorption, but it was just lying there, so I picked it up to throw away.

We finished off the 40 min dive and when we got to the surface it was pure elation! We were whooping and hollering and splashing the water around, it was an incredible feeling!

The boat was a buzz with super excited divers who saw it and many divers bummed they missed out. But most, if not all, were very happy for the groups that saw it since it’s such a special sighting.

Also word quickly spread that I got a video of it so I immediately downloaded it and airdropped it to everyone on the boat. Also word spread quick in our dive team group chat and I shared it with them as well. There was a lot of excitement in the air!!

We took a little group picture doing the whale shark sign to commemorate this amazing dive!

With our adrenaline still pumping, we made our way to the second dive of the morning, HTMS Sattakut.

Now this is a dive I’ve done countless times now, but today, since we were deep diving, we had to wait at least an hour between dives to “off gas” and release as much nitrogen from our bodies as we could before diving. This is so our NDL time limit is higher.

Usually at this dive site we circle the bottom of the wreck and then make our way slowly to the pinnacle nearby… but since we wanted to stay deep, we ended up staying below 20m the first 20 minutes of our dive!

There’s a giant Jenkins ray that lives under this wreck… we didn’t find it today though. We did find a puffer fish, a blue spotted eel, and got to enjoy the ominous but very cool shipwreck.

The visibility wasn’t great and on our way back to the boat, we got a bit turned around. But we ended up nearby the boat still and finished off another long 40 minute deep dive!

It had been a crazy morning… not only did I get certified to dive to 40m but I also saw something I never even thought I’d see in my life, a whale shark! This buzz and excitement carried me all the way back to Taco Shack, where I was greeted by excited (and a bit jealous) instructors and fellow dive masters!

We cleaned up all the morning gear and then it was time for a much needed celebratory quesadilla.

After eating, I played a couple games of pool, and then went to my room and took a nice long nap. I woke up at 3:30pm dazed and still tired but at 4pm I had another Science of Diving class, so I had to get ready.

Today we discussed a lot of the injuries of diving and the science behind them and how to avoid them. It was a bit of a repeat from my react right and stress and rescue training, but it’s always important to hear and rehash. We also dove into the cardiovascular and respiratory systems in more detail and how diving can affect them.

After our 2 hour class, I played some pool with Chris, our mentor, and Kit. I also got a pad see ew for dinner at Taco Shack.

Kit and I hung around chatting for the next hour. It had been a long day and there was a lot to chat about!

But eventually exhaustion set in and it was time for me to head off to my room to lie down and decompress.

Strangely enough, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of DCI (drum corps international) content. I marched in the Colts drum and bugle corps back in 2016… going on 10 years?! They are doing super well in the standings right now which is fantastic to see. It made me miss playing the trumpet and marching, also the friends I made and hadn’t seen in forever. But it was a nice reminder that I’ve done some pretty freaking cool things in my life so far.

And I’m continuing to do some pretty crazy and amazing things!

I’m very fortunate to have had so many opportunities to work on myself, grow, and as cliche as it is… find myself. Growth will hopefully be a forever in my life and eventually maybe I’ll figure out what my “thing” is. But for now, I’m very game to keep trying and learning new skills and seeing where these adventures take me!

Here’s to more whale shark sightings, good times, and amazing adventures!

– Elie