Day 213! Another day of leading fun divers! Today we had an insane encounter with a great barracuda. I’ve never been so close to one before! It was a pretty surreal experience and definitely was a little terrifying but also super freaking cool!

I had another group of fun divers this morning! Basically the rest of my time as a DMT at Taco Shack, I’ll be taking fun divers in the morning. Eventually, I’ll do another skill circuit review with Chris and after that I’ll start teaching refresher courses as well! But until then, it’ll be getting more and more experience leading dives!

Today I was leading Sofia and Marie! Sofia has been diving a ton with us, tomorrow is her last day on the island. But Marie was a new diver for me, so I was curious to see how she was. Turns out, she recently did her advanced and 40m deep dive with Taco. So I had a feeling she’d be okay.

Marie showed up and was a bit nervous to dive today though… she had a bit of a cough from the AC in her room. I assured her it’d be alright, I cough underwater all the time, but I also said it was up to her if she wanted to dive or not today! It was a fun dive after all, we want it to be fun.

She ended up deciding to dive, so we set out for a beautiful morning of dives.

The weather was perfect today! It was sunny, calm waters, and the perfect temperature. It was such a nice way to start the day and it was even more nice that the rain had finally stopped at least for a little bit.

We made our way out to Chumphon Pinnacle to kick off our day. Even though the weather conditions were stellar, the pinnacle still had a pretty solid thermocline at 18/19m again.

We descended down and dove around for a while, swimming through the big school of fusiliers, seeing the same school of barracudas as yesterday, and we saw four ginormous groupers lurking around!

We finished our dive after 42 minutes, diving to our deepest point of 22.1m.

I attempted to check out barracuda rock today, at the southern most part of the pinnacle. But the visibility was so bad I turned back around and decided I’d try again another day (luckily our barracuda encounter was still in the cards today).

When we surfaced, the beautiful weather called for an above water selfie!

We got back on the boat and made our way to our next dive site, HTMS Sattakut and Hin Pee Wee (my favorite dive site name).

Again, the weather and the visibility at the surface made it seem like we were going to be in for a beautiful dive… but as we descended this time, a huge thermocline was around the shipwreck.

I attempted to take us down to the bottom of the wreck but immediately took us back up. When we entered the thermocline I immediately lost site of the wreck AND everyone around it. I wanted to make sure my two divers actually got to experience the wreck, so we circled it from the top side.

After we spent a bit of time at the wreck, we made our way over to Hin Pee Wee to finish out the dive. The visibility got much better on our way and we saw a great barracuda out in the distance! Unfortunately, Marie missed it, but don’t worry… it made its return.

We continued diving and all of a sudden I felt someone tugging on my fin. I turned around and saw Sofia pointing like crazy to the left of me… when I turned I couldn’t believe my eyes! The great barracuda was directly next to us. It was easily 1.5m long!

I had never been so close to one while diving before! I quickly whipped out my camera and filmed it as it made its way away from us… then turned back around and came directly towards us opening and closing its mouth with its razor sharp teeth.

It was a really freaking cool encounter and we were all very excited about it.

We finished off our dive by seeing a file fish as well! It’s only the second one I’d ever seen… it’s a unique looking fish with blue spots and it’s very thin. I didn’t capture a picture of it this time, but I’ll try to in the future!

We dove for 43 minutes with a max depth of 22.4m. Both dives today were great! I felt super comfortable in the ocean and leading these two fun divers!

After getting back on the boat, we made our way back to Taco Shack to clean up equipment. When we finished, I went home, showered, and went back to Taco for lunch.

I sat with Lydia, Kit, Sina, big Chris, and little Chris (our way of differentiating our mentor and our new DMT). Today was Lydia’s last day on the island and she wrote very sweet letters for all of us before she left.

After lunch, Kit and I drove her and her bags to the pier and said our see you laters! Lydia was one of my first friends on the island and the last remaining member of our friend group from when I first started volunteering at Taco Shack! It’s definitely sad to see her go, but she’s coming back to Koh Tao in January to do her instructor course, so I’m sure our paths will be crossing again on Koh Tao at some point in the future.

Kit and I couldn’t hang out at the pier long because we had a field trip to go on with our other DMTs.

Big Chris set up an appointment for us to go tour a hyperbaric chamber! This chamber is used for people who experience decompression sickness (DCS) or Arterial Gas Embolisms.

The chamber essentially puts the diver back under the same pressure as when they were diving to crush and release the nitrogen built up in their body (in the case of DCS).

When we arrived, we were greeted by Max, one of the hyperbaric chamber workers. He’s also a diver that dives deep to recover things from ship wrecks and goes on rescue missions for lost divers. He ALSO has a very intense job that requires him to be up at basically all hours of the day.

We started our tour by listening to him talk about DCS and how it’s caused. He also went into how partying, lack of sleep, and dehydration can be a big cause of DCS too. So even if you have a perfect dive, these factors could lead to experiencing this condition.

So much so, they know after every jungle party there’ll be a couple cases of DCS the following day… I thought this was wild!

We asked him a bunch of questions to get a better understanding of DCS, air out some common misconceptions, and get a better understanding of the process of the hyperbaric chamber. I really felt like I had a better understanding of DCS, some reasons it occurs, and how the hyperbaric chamber worked.

But to understand the hyperbaric chamber even better, we went into the room adjacent to us and got a close look at how it worked.

Max talked us through each step of the process and how this piece of 1950s technology worked. The amazing thing is that it’s all manual valve operated, so even when the power goes out on the island (which it does often) it will never lose power.

We even got to go inside of it, without being pressurized and got to see how crappy the conditions are in it… another reason to not ever want to get DCS!

This was a really cool and informative afternoon and I was very glad I had the opportunity to see the hyperbolic chamber! I hope I never ever have to see it for any reason outside of educational purposes!

After we finished up, we all went our separate ways and I went home to take a nap. When I woke up, I played guitar for an hour and then headed out for some dinner.

My friends were all napping or busy so I went to Taco Shack for dinner and to play some pool. My friend Myo, who works at Taco, was down to play! So we played a handful of games before and after I ate.

I still can’t get over that I can get this amount of food for 50 baht! It’s definitely a huge perk for doing my DMT at Taco.

I then sat and chatted with some of the dive shop staff in their AC before heading back to my apartment to call it a night.

I have more fun divers in the morning! Hopefully we’ll get to see some more cool fishes and I really hope the weather stays the same as today! I’ll also have an afternoon dive with Kit and my mentor Chris. We’ll be doing our second skills circuit so we can start teaching the refresher courses!

– Elie