Day 214! Refresher divers?! What is that! Well if it’s been more than 6 months since your last dive, most dive shops make you do a refresher course to get your brain back into the swing of diving. It’s usually the role of the DM to teach these to get these divers excited to dive again (safely).

I woke up this morning with another early start. I think this will be a fairly common trend for the rest of my DMT. Kit and I have officially started the “internship” phase of our DMT and we are now taking fun divers out every day… soon we’ll be taking refreshers out too!

Today I was taking one fun diver, Sofia. It was her last day of diving on Koh Tao before she headed back home. So I was hoping today was going to be a good morning of diving!

Our first dive was to White Rock. The visibility wasn’t the best at the dive site today, but we still saw a puffer fish and two moray eels swimming around!

It was a fairly lowkey dive, but a long one! We spent 53 minutes exploring the dive site and went down to almost 19m. It was a really pretty dive, as always!

Our second dive was to HTMS Sattakut, one of the many shipwrecks around the island.

Now for this dive, the visibility was even worse… so much so, I almost didn’t find the shipwreck. Luckily I found a buoy line near it and dove in the direction I knew it was located and eventually found it.

I also stumbled upon Kit diving around with his fun diver and I snuck up on him and gave him a little jump when he realized I was directly next to him. The visibility was that bad though, even though I was following him, he would’ve had a hard time knowing I was there.

I do enjoy the visibility being a bit turbid around the shipwrecks. It makes it feel like we’re entering Davy Jones locker. But as we made our way over to Hin Pee Wee this time, we didn’t see the great barracuda. Apparently one of our instructors, Siri saw it in a similar spot as us yesterday!

After 43 minutes, we called it a dive! It was another very nice dive and I thoroughly enjoyed diving with Sofia! She’ll be heading home to do her DMT at a boarding school, instead of on this beautiful island!

With two more successful fun dives down, we called it a morning!

I wasn’t done with diving yet. Today, Kit and I were diving with Chris in the afternoon. This was going to be the time for our second skill circuit. Once we completed this, we were ready to start taking refresher courses.

We had some pretty sub par massaman curry from the hostel for lunch before heading back on the boat.

After lunch, we headed to the boat. For our first dive, we went to Mango Bay. Here we swam out to a very shallow area to do our skill circuit. From the moment we jumped into the water till the very end, Chris acted super well about being a problem diver.

For the first half of the first dive, we mimicked Chris to ensure we know what skills were needed for the refresher courses. Chris filmed us doing it so we could watch it later and see how we can improves.

The second half of the first dive, I led. I carried my SMB all the way and kept checking very periodically to make sure Chris wasn’t messing around too much. He had a lot of problems in this dive and the next one.

I successfully helped him through his problems, but the fun wasn’t over yet.

Chris felt like Kit and I were both ready to start teaching refreshers now. But Kit needed to lead the next dive to deal with problem child Chris.

Our second dive was at White Rock and it was hilarious watching what Chris was doing. He can get pretty goofy with his bad diver scenarios.

We had two super long dives this afternoon, 74 and 54 minutes. I’ll definitely be having a day off in the next couple of days.

We made our way back to Taco and I quickly showered before ordering a chicken quesadilla for dinner.

I sat with Kit, Chelsea, and Chris and we enjoyed dinner and each other’s company. After we all finished eating, we decided to head over to Chris’s apartment to play cards!

Turns out, he has an amazing apartment, overlooking the main pier! Hector joined us too!

We ended up playing cards for a couple hours before calling it a night. It was a long and lovely day filled with diving, another box checked on my DMT, and a nice night with friends.

Tomorrow… I’m teaching my first refresher course! I’ll also be leading a fun diver in the morning… who I’ve been told might need some extra attention. So hopefully it’s nothing as bad as the one I had the other day. At the very least I was given a heads up! We’ll see how it all goes!

– Elie