Day 208! Today I led an open water certified course. I had a feeling this would be a bit of a challenge however; I think it went really well! All the guys were super happy to be apart of the diving, but more on that soon.

Yesterday, I didn’t get the chance to do my dive briefing and guiding evaluation… but today, I was going to.

I woke up nice and early for the morning boat and got ready for the challenge ahead. For today’s dives, I would be leading Chris’s current open water group through the two dives of the morning.

The first evaluation entailed me giving a thorough dive briefing. A dive briefing is how we communicate our dive plan, information, what I expect as a dive guide, hand signals, etc. to our group.

This went very well and I felt like I did a good job engaging the students. Chris only had a few minor critiques for me after the fact which was nice too. With one of the two evaluations out of the way, it was time to gear up and head into the water.

Our first dive site today was Southwest Pinnacle. I haven’t been to this dive site in a while but I have been a number of times! Especially around when I first started my DMT.

Because this was a group of new divers, I knew I was in for a bit of a challenge. We descended down towards the dive site and dove our way around the pinnacle.

For a majority of the dive I was looking at the students. I was telling them to stay with their buddy, come up and down to my level, and also making sure they were safe!

The air consumption wasn’t the best in this group… but to be fair, mine wasn’t the best when I started either! I still have a long way to go on it too. So by the time we reached the giant school of fusiliers, it was time to turn back around and head back to the boat.

The dive ended up being 32 minutes, but we saw some cool things still! We saw the big school of fusiliers, a school of barracudas, and a school of 6 or 8 fairly large squids! It was my first squid siting while diving so that was a big bonus!

We meandered our way to the buoy line and went up for our safety stop. I deployed my SMB, we swam a bit closer to the boat and ended our dive!

After the dive Chris had nothing but really nice things to say about my guiding. This made me feel really good and happy that I was able to do it successfully on my first try. He also told me that he feels very confident in my ability to guide clients! The next step now is to keep taking fun divers out on dives while I start getting ready to teach refresher courses too.

The guiding wasn’t over yet! Our second dive was HTMS Sattakut and Hin Pee Wee.

We decided to do a bit of an underwater swim to the shipwreck instead of surface swimming. So I led our group through the descent and made our way to the shipwreck.

When we arrived at the shipwreck, we were immediately met with a beautiful site… it wasn’t the shipwreck itself, it was a lions mane jelly fish. This one was HUGE! Eventually, I will have pictures of it, but for now imagine a giant stuffed animal and this was size of it.

We made our way back towards where we came, to enjoy Hin Pee Wee… but when we got halfway there, we got distracted by a GREAT barracuda. This fish was easily 1.5m long and has a ginormous head. It’s definitely the biggest barracuda I’ve ever seen!

Because of the air consumption of the group, we made our way back to the boat fairly early. This dive just hit. The 30 minute mark.

Chris again gave me some nice praise on my guiding on that dive!

We got back from the dive and packed up our gear and then it was time to head back to Taco. I helped cleanup all the gear from the morning dive and then made my way home to shower.

I then went back to Taco for lunch with Chris. Today I was ALSO doing my open water day one presentation for Chris and he was evaluating me on that as well. I prepared a white board and notes on my visa run, so I felt ready!

I went over everything an instructor would chat with the students about on their first day of diving. I messed up a couple things here and there and Chris would interject, but nothing major!

With that hour plus class out of the way, I had passed 3 out of 3 evaluations today.

After the class was over, I made my way back to my apartment. I took a nice power nap and then played some guitar. I then met up with Kit and Lydia at Taco Shack and had a couple beers with them.

During this time, we met some very nice people staying at Taco. They were playing a game on the pool table I had never seen before, but I wanted to give it a go! Basically all the balls were in a 5 x 3 grid on the table. You get one shot to sink a ball in without scratching or touching another ball. It looked easy… but it was really hard!

I then met up with Chelsea, Guada, and Yi at a restaurant on the walking street, called Charcoal Grill. It was a very bougie and beautiful restaurant overlooking the beach.

Yi was the one that asked me to come join and offered to pay for my meal since my plan was to just get dinner after. It was very kind of him and I wasn’t expecting it. After we split a charcuterie board, it was time to devour my first hamburger in a long while!

Even though it’s not my usual vibe, this restaurant was a nice change of pace. Also having real cheese was a biggg perk!

After dinner, we made our way to Bamboo Bar because Franco was playing in his Latin band tonight. We swung our hips for an hour… but I was super exhausted. So I made my way back home and called it a night!

It was a blast (as always) watching Franco play and I had a HUGE smile on my face the entire time I was there.

Today went really really well! It was a huge confidence boost on my diving and it was really nice to succeed with a bit more a difficult group. I’m looking forward to taking more fun divers and helping them experience the amazing underwater world around Koh Tao!

– Elie