Day 212! Today was my friend Lydia’s last day on Koh Tao… for now. She’ll be coming back to do her instructor course eventually. But for now she is heading back to England!

After a shaky fun dive yesterday, I was ready for a calmer day of diving. Thankfully today, I had two fun divers that I knew and I knew they were competent divers. So I was optimistic that today was going to be much better than yesterday.

Today we were heading to Chumphon Pinnacle first. This dive site is the rival to Southwest Pinnacle and is equally as beautiful.

I had two fun divers this morning, originally Sofia and Patrick. I led Patrick the other day and Sofia was the rescue diver I assisted a couple days ago. But there was another fun diver who happened to be friends with Patrick. So Kit and I put them together and I took Sofia and the other fun diver.

I gave my two fun divers the dive briefing and when we got to the dive site, we geared up and jumped in. After yesterday, I’m always bringing extra weights with me. They actually came in handy today because Sofia had a bit of trouble going down.

She wanted to try practicing diving with two weights (instead of three) and it wasn’t working. So I acted quickly, handed her one of the spare weights I had, and she was able to descend like normal. Yesterday taught me a lot and I’m very glad I went through it to learn from it.

We ended up going on a deep and long dive. We hung out around the 20m mark for a while and the entire dive was almost 50 minutes!

Today at Chumphon, there was a huge thermocline. At exactly 18m, there was a line of fog that you could see from above. If you went into it, the water got much colder and the visibility was terrible.

We hung out in it for a bit and did the swim through at the dive site. Bob hadn’t seen the plaque in memoriam to the Koh Tao diver and I wanted to point it out to him.

We then made our way around the dive site and we saw some crazy schools of fish and saw large schools of trevally chasing after them.

It was a really nice dive and we ended right next to the boat which was an added bonus. We were already off to a much better start than the day before!

Our second dive of the morning was to HTMS Suphairin and No Name pinnacle.

I actually like this shipwreck a lot, maybe more than Sattakut… but that might just be because we don’t come here as often.

Sofia, Bob, and I made our way towards the shipwreck to start our dive. As we descended, the visibility got pretty bad… so we didn’t spend too long at the bottom of the wreck. But as we made our way to the front of the wreck, the visibility became much clearer.

Eventually I made the call to start circling higher on the wreck, swim through the captains cabin, and then… I found a very cool little critter… a nudibranch!

I had never seen this type before so I was really excited. Nudibranches are little alien looking sea slugs! Apparently these little critters are scattered all over this shipwreck. But I’d never seen it before so it made me very happy to see!

I’m not sure my fun divers were as excited as I was, but I still made a point to show them and hang around it for a little bit.

After we swam around the shipwreck, we made our way towards No Name Pinnacle. On our way, at the front of the shipwreck, were two very large queen fish! I hadn’t seen them in awhile, so it was a nice big fish to see.

The current around No Name wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t great. So after circling the pinnacle a few times, I decided to stay on the side protected from the current. I worked my way back and forth, all the way up the pinnacle.

Then I told them to follow me and we made our way back to the boat… or what I thought was the boat. Turns out it was just a boat nearby our line.

It was another great almost 50 minute dive. We finished up and made our way back to taco shack.

I helped clean out bags, and once that was done, I snuck off to my apartment to take a shower.

I then came back to Taco Shack for lunch.

I devoured two tacos while chatting with a few friends hanging out in the lobby of Taco Shack.

I played some pool with our new DMT Chris and then went to 7-11 to top off my SIM card since it ran out today. When I came back, my plan was to nap. But Kit needed a ride right then to a strangers place to buy a motorbike (I was his ride there).

It took us a bit to find where this person lived, but we eventually found it,

Kit bought the motorbike and we made our way back to Sairee. After this, I went home to take my much needed nap. I was exhausted!

Eventually, I met back up with Lydia and Kit for drinks at Taco Shack and then dinner at Duck 995.

Today was Lydia’s last day on the island, so after dinner we went to bamboo bar to hang out with instructors, dive masters, and other friends of Lydia’s to round out her time on Koh Tao.

It was a really nice day on Koh Tao today. I had two really great fun divers and a really nice rest of my day too!

Tomorrow I’ll be leading some more fun divers and hopefully it’ll go just as well!

– Elie