Day 199! Ah! One more day till 200 days of traveling… well I guess being abroad. Traveling has turned into being stuck on a tropical island, but I cannot complain! This change of plans has been incredible and today was another amazing day in my diving career, I led my first fun diver!

Today’s the big day! I woke up bright and early, ready to take on the newest challenge in my diving learning, leading a fun diver!

The whole point of becoming a Dive Master is to be able to lead divers anywhere in the world. We’re building our tool kit to allow us to dive an unknown dive site but still know how to navigate it. But today, Kit and I would be taking on our first client… someone who paid to dive and we need to make sure they have a fun and safe dive!! Crazy!!

We weren’t quite sure who our diver was, but this will be the fun new game we’ll have to play in the morning… guess the fun diver.

Today, Kit and I were taking Jema out diving! She just finished her open water certification and wanted to go out diving one more time before she left. Since she was only open water certified, today’s dives would be no deeper than 18m.

For our first dive, I was leading! We were at white rock, a dive site I know well and have led classes a few times here already. We decided to each take the dive site we were most comfortable with to lessen the stress variables on this first fun dive lead.

Over the course of the next 47 minutes, we meandered our way through the dive site. I would check in on Jema and Kit constantly and point out cool things I saw.

Right away we saw a school of fusiliers being attacked by a swarm of giant trevally. And then immediately after that, we saw a Goliath grouper out hunting during the early morning.

We also saw a very cute puffer fish and a remora dancing around my instructor friend, Zach and his student! There were a lot of people diving the dive site and a bit of current, but we ended up having a very successful first dive! Jema thoroughly enjoyed her first dive at white rock which was great to hear!

The addition of making sure a dive is good and fun is definitely stressful… but I also want an exciting dive, so it didn’t add too much stress. Also the more and more I dive at these dive sites, the more I’ll learn where the cool things are to show future clients!

The second dive was at HTMS Sattakut and Hin Pee Wee. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go super close to the shipwreck, but we still were going to circle it for Jema to see! Kit took over this dive and I got to be Jema’s buddy for the dive.

The visibility on this dive started really bad and we weren’t sure if we’d be able to see much of the shipwreck. But thankfully it cleared up enough for Jema to see and enjoy it!

After circling the wreck, we made our way over to Hin Pee Wee (a pinnacle dive spot close by) and circled that for the rest of the dive. On the way over, we saw a giant puffer fish and it let me take a full front on shot of it!

This dive ended up being another very successful dive! Kit and I felt super accomplished that we were able to take a new diver out, deal with any issues that arose (which was very little to none, maybe some equalization issues).

We of course had to commemorate this moment with a group picture when we got back to Taco!

Because this went well, there’s a high probability we’ll be taking more fun divers out in the near future… if not tomorrow.

But even with this accomplishment, we weren’t done diving! Today was time for a double boat!

The afternoon dives started with eating lunch at the hostel and then hopping on the boat to mango bay.

These afternoon dives were just practice navigation for Kit and I. At mango bay, we made our way down the opposite side of the bay (not the trigger pit side like last time). This side of the bay had a long wall of beautiful coral and active sea life.

We honestly both really enjoyed this dive as the coral gave a lot of depth to mango bay. This bay is usually just for shallow sandy areas for skills, but this part of the bay was very pretty and made me like mango bay a lot more! I’m looking forward to exploring it more.

The second dive was at white rock again. But this time there was no current and the visibility was much better. Kit also led us through the dive, so he could get a better handle on the dive site as well!

We again, wound our way through the dive site spotting another giant puffer fish, some giant groupers, and even the turtle that lives in the dive site… which it’s super rare to see out and about in the middle of the day.

Now the wild thing about the turtle spotting is, I randomly told Kit to keep an eye out for it, since we were in the area we saw it on our night dive a week or two ago. And then less than 30 seconds later, we saw it soaring overhead!

It unfortunately was too far away and swam a lot further south than we wanted to go… so we only saw it from afar. But it was really cool to see another turtle while diving!

We ended our dives and called it a day of diving!

I got back to Taco Shack and was about to order food… but then I got asked by my friend P (former hostel volunteer as well) to help give him a ride after he dropped off his motorbike. He was leaving the island today after being here for 5 months!

I then got back to the hostel and ordered a, much needed, chicken quesadilla.

The rest of the night I spent hanging out with instructors and then hanging out with some of the students who were on the boat today. We played pool and chatted about diving and their travels. It was nice to have a social night, but I was ready for bed well before I got to it.

Tomorrow, Kit and I will be leading another fun diver! We’ll be starting at Chumphon pinnacle… so maybe another whale shark spotting?? We’ll see!

– Elie