Day 211! Well… my plan was to take some photos under water today, but one of my fun divers had another plan for me. Today is the story about my fun diver who made our dive quite difficult. (I’m of course going to keep names out of it for the sake of the fun diver)

I woke up today with absolutely no clue my day would unfold the way it did.

I had texted one of the instructors the night before to ask about one of my new fun divers. The reason I asked them was because the fun diver had just done a refresher course to allow them to dive (if you haven’t dived in a while they make you relearn the skills for safety reasons). I wanted a heads up on how they were as a diver and the instructor said they were fine outside of their air consumption.

This was fine with me, so I didn’t expect anything of it.

I got to Taco Shack and found my two fun divers. We got their bags and headed to the taxi and set out on a dive I’d probably never forget.

We got onto the boat and I found a spot for the two fun divers to set up. I went to set up my own equipment and only a couple minutes later one of my fun divers dropped his regulator screw over the edge of the boat and into the ocean…

Now this is something we tell our open water students to be careful of because it’s worth 1000 baht and they will be the ones that have to pay for it. Unfortunately for him, this was his fate after doing this. He’s an advanced diver and should know not to unscrew it all the way… but in his defense, mistakes do happen and this wasn’t the end of the world. But it gave me my first hint that this diver wasn’t the most experienced.

Luckily we had an extra regulator on the boat and switched it out for the time being.

I gave my dive briefing, we got to the dive site, and I had the two fun divers do their buddy check. We then entered the water at Southwest Pinnacle, and swam to our buoy. There was a bit of a current on the surface and I could tell the same fun diver was struggling a bit to kick against it. I realized this was because he was bicycle kicking, not flutter kicking… so I tried to encourage him to keep his legs straight to be able to push against it and eventually he was able to.

We made it a bit past the buoy, because I knew we would drift as we descended. But I didn’t account for it enough with what happened next.

We descended down 3 meters and everything was fine… but after this the dive started to go a bit hay wire. This fun diver was having trouble descending, which is totally okay, we always go down as slow as our slowest diver. But he wouldn’t listen to me when I showed him to remember to deflate, he wasn’t remembering to equalize even when I told him to, anddd we were drifting with the current almost to the point where he was about to go under a boat as he’s floating up.

At first I was showing him the sign to start kicking towards me… he didn’t, then I tried again… he didn’t… eventually we got to a point where I yelled “swim” through my mouthpiece and he finally got the picture. But at the same time, I grabbed him, swam, and pulled him away from the boat. We tried to descend again but we got dragged back to the boat by the current, so I pulled him out again.

By this time it had been almost 10 minutes of trying to descend, so I told all of us to go up, because this was turning into a very precarious and unsafe situation.

Meanwhile during all of this, the other fun diver was going down fine with us and just waiting to have their dive. Unfortunately for them, they had to come up too.

I started chatting with my fun diver, asking him what was wrong, reminding him he has to deflate his BC, exhale for longer, inhale slowly, etc. I also had to tell him about how unsafe it was to be that close to the boat and he needs to listen to me when I tell him to do something. Allegedly, he’d never had these problems before, so after hearing that and talking through things, I decided to try descending again… but this time, by using a controlled line descent.

This appeared to do the trick, but it was going to take us a while to descend all the way. Also while we were descending, instead of doing the descent properly, he was climbing down the rope like spider man. He wouldn’t listen when I stopped him and explained under the water to be in the same position as me and the other fun diver.

During all of this, I had water in my eyes and nose because my mask straps still aren’t exactly where I want them. Also at shallower meters water gets in easier because there’s less pressure.

Thankfully we made it to the dive site and started our dive… but at this point, this fun diver had 120 bar left in his tank… which is the sign to turn back around! But, I wanted to give the other diver a bit of a dive so we made our way around (near the buoy line) for only 10 minutes. At this point he was already at 70 bar so we had to make our way BACK to the boat. During these 10 minutes of diving though, he still wouldn’t fully deflate his BC and was taking to big and quick of inhalations so he was constantly having to force his way back down to our level.

I even at one point forced his BC to deflate, but none of my attempts to help him slow his breathing down worked. Luckily, he didn’t float up very far from us at any point.

I deployed my SMB early, just in case, and we did our safety stop… the dive in total was 25 minutes, majority of which was spent descending and ascending.

We surfaced and I was very frustrated. But I kept calm and told the fun divers, that when we got back to the boat we had a lot to debrief about.

Thankfully, my mentor, Chris, was on the boat this morning. So I pulled him aside, told him what happened and asked for his advice on how to deal with this situation.

Chris told me I dealt with it really well and that he was honestly glad I had to go through it because I’d learn a lot from it and I’m going to have bad divers throughout my time as a dive guide. But he also gave me advice on how to explain to this guy what he needs to do differently politely.

The first thing was moving my second fun diver to Kit’s fun diving team. Then I sat with the other fun diver and went over the different things I needed from him on the next dive so we could have a fun and safe dive.

Thankfully, it appeared this dive debrief worked because our next dive went WAY better.

I also gave him an extra weight to help him throughout the dive.

The second dive was at white rock and it was just going to be me and him. We geared up, did our buddy checks, and made our way to the buoy line to try our hand at another free descent.

White rock is much shallower and wayyy less current, so we had a much easier place to descend and try again. But I was watching him like a hawk. This time he was deflating correctly, breathing better, and giving me much clearer hand signs which was another thing I briefed him about.

He had a little bit of equalization troubles on the way down, but I helped him go up a little bit and he was able to equalize the rest of the way down.

I continued to watch him for the majority of the dive, but this dive was exponentially better than the last. I kept us on the side of the dive site nearest to the boat in case anything were to go wrong, but thankfully nothing did.

At one point we crossed paths with Chris’s group and one of his students randomly hit me with a round of rock paper scissors, we tied a few times and then she beat me. It was a goofy thing to have happen and definitely lightened my mood from the dive at hand.

We wrapped up the dive after 40ish minutes of diving and went back to the boat.

It was an intense morning… but I’m definitely better for it! I’m very glad I just had another rescue assist because it had me in the right mindset for a situation like this. I’m also very proud with how I handled the situation and that no one got hurt.

When we got back to Taco Shack I helped clean up bags, went home to shower, and then met up with my friends at a restaurant called Blue Shark for brunch! I also stopped and grabbed a mango smoothie on the way, I needed a comfort drink.

I had never been to this restaurant but I had my first chicken sandwich with a fried egg in a while. It was super tasty, but I wanted to make sure I got some Thai food for dinner.

It was a really lovely lunch and a great way to release the stress from the morning. But we weren’t done hanging out as we all went to the beach together afterwards to hang some more!

We went to a beach I hadn’t been to called Sai Thong. It was a really pretty beach with plenty of shade to relax in since I still don’t want to get my tattoo in the ocean. I played some cards with Sina and a few others that were friends of friends. It was nice to be hanging on a beach again, I sometimes find it hard to get the motivation to leave the AC after a long day of diving, but I need to do it more.

After the beach, I drove by French market, which had just started their buy one get one of the day… so I went inside to see if they had any crookies, and they did! So I got two of them for later to share with my friends. I then went home for a much needed nap.

When I woke up, my friend Chelsea wanted to hang out. I promised her I’d teach her how to use the video editing software, davinci resolve. She just got into underwater photography and videography this year and has taken some amazing videos that she wants to edit.

We munched on crookies as I explained some tips for her. We didn’t get through a ton of tips before our friend Pauline wanted to hang more too. So we went over to her apartment, where we were joined by James, and Chris! We spent the next couple hours chatting and then 8pm rolled around before we knew it and we were all very hungry.

So we went to a restaurant I also hadn’t been to called mint Thai food, which actually was right next to Taco Shack.

I enjoyed a curry fried rice and got absurdly full. It was then time to call it a night because I had more fun divers in the morning!

Hopefully (I believe it will) tomorrow will go much smoother. But I’m glad I know that I can roll with the punches and deal with some intense situations under the water! I’ve come a long way in the past couple of months and it’s really cool to see!

– Elie