Day 200! Wow… 200 days have flown by. I can’t wait to get back on the road and continue traveling. But we still have plenty of time.

Today was another early morning dive and I was taking another fun diver out with Kit! I guess yesterday went well enough that they want us to keep taking out customers.

Our diver today was Jill. She did her advanced course at Taco Shack 8 months ago and had come back to dive for 2 weeks to end off her travels. There’s a solid chance we’ll be leading her a lot over the course of this week as well.

Today we were heading to Chumphon Pinnacle and HTMS Sattakut/Hin Pee Wee. Since Kit led Sattakut yesterday, we decided he’d lead the first dive today at Chumphon.

Now the last time we went to Chumphon was when we saw the absolutely stunning whale shark. The energy was high in hopes to see another!

Jill was advanced certified, so we were able to go down as far as 30m today! Kit led us around the pinnacle, starting around 27m and slowly making our way up and around the dive site.

We unfortunately didn’t see a whale shark this time (I found out later, allegedly, one was spotted this morning when we weren’t there). We did however see a ginormous grouper, very large barracudas, and two giant schools of fusiliers.

The dive lasted a nice a long time, 48 minutes! And so did our second one.

I led our group through the Sattakut wreck and Hin Pee Wee.

The visibility wasn’t the best as we descended down to the bottom of the shipwreck… so we didn’t spend too much time there. I brought us up slowly around the boat and we circled it for a bit before moving on to Hin Pee Wee.

There were a ton of people at this dive site today, which added to the navigation… but it was really doable!

This dive was very chilled out and Jill said she enjoyed both dives a lot! It’s so nice to be able to help enhance someone’s travel and diving experience!

This dive was one minute longer than the previous and we made it down to just over 28m. After two really nice and successful dives, we had another satisfied fun diver on our hands. Also, this dive was about to mark my 99th dive!

After diving, I went and got lunch with Pauline, James, Jill, and Chelsea. Jill was actually Pauline’s student, so she ended up hanging out with us throughout the majority of the afternoon.

We went to a new restaurant for me, called Tukta. Pauline claimed they had the best massaman curry on the island. It was good, but I think blue chair still has it beat.

We got on to the conversation about haircuts while eating and James said he’d be game to cut my hair today! James is a very talented barber from the UK, so I was excited to get a cleanup by him.

This inspired us all to go over to Pauline and Kiki’s apartment for the haircut and also to chat and play some games.

Not only did we play UNO, we also played Dobble. This is the same thing as the US game called Spot It.

Out of no where, a torrential storm rolled in… probably meaning less sunny days again. But around 6:30pm, I had to make my way back to Taco in the rain for a science of diving lecture by Chris.

It was a solid 2 hours of information all about Decompression sickness

We almost finished up the entire course, but we ran out of time for tonight so we’ll finish it in a couple days.

After class, I got 3 tacos.

I then called it an early night and made my way back to my room to crash!

Tomorrow is my 100th dive and some fun happens… but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow to read what its about.

– Elie