Day 215! Well today’s the day for a couple things. First, I had the “extra attention”‘fun diver in the morning… the second one was I had my first refresher diver today! It’s very cool and exciting to be at a point where I can help people get back into diving.

I woke up nice and early today for my last day of diving before a day off! It’s been 9 straight days… they lost count of when my last day off was. BUT I was very happy and game to keep diving, I was getting a bit tired too though.

The nice thing about diving so much, is I’ve gotten used to waking up at 6am. That might change after sleeping in tomorrow though.

But there was no time to sleep in today because I had a fun diver to take diving. Today’s fun diver was Michael… the day before, I was told by my manager, Iris, that I would probably need to be a bit more attentive to him because there “might be problems…”

It was nice to get a heads up this time, but I wasn’t sure what the dives this morning would entail.

This diver ended up being, what we call, an overconfident diver. These divers like to try and one up everything you say, try to make it sound like they’re the ones leading the dive, or they say they know things that they actually don’t.

It started with our first conversation… everything I said needed to be one up’d. Where it became the most frustrating was during my dive briefings.

That aside, the dives were fine. We started our morning at Southwest Pinnacle. The visibility was okay today, but there was a thermocline at the 20m mark.

We went into it for a sec before I told my fun diver to come up with me and he looked at me and told me to come down… I was like no… I’m leading… This happened a few times on the dive where he’d try to tell me where to go or what to do… it wasn’t the most fun thing.

Now, was this frustrating? Yes. Was this anywhere near as bad as my fun diver from the other day? No. But it was another learning experience of how to deal with a specific type of client!

The first dive was at Southwest Pinnacle. We spent 40 minutes diving around this beautiful dive site.

The visibility wasn’t amazing today, but we still saw the massive school of fusiliers, a couple blue spotted stingrays, and a medium sized barracuda, amongst other fish too.

We finished our first dive and Michael was super happy. It was his first dive in a while and he told me how much it meant to him to have me guiding him in the water and how great it was to be back diving. This made up for his demeanor a little bit and it was nice to hear how much it meant to him.

The second dive of the morning was to HTMS Sattakut and Hin Pee Wee.

We spent just under 40 minutes exploring the ship wreck and swimming around the beautiful pinnacle that’s directly nearby it. The thermocline at the shipwreck dropped a few meters today, but it was still dense enough that going to the bottom of the shipwreck didn’t make sense.

So we just dove around the top, made our way through the captains cabin, and then started heading towards Hin Pee Wee.

The visibility around Hin Pee Wee was really nice and the school of small barracuda was still around. I really enjoy diving directly next to them! Some of our groups saw the great barracuda again, but we missed it this time around.

We finished up the dives and got back onto the boat to wrap up my morning of diving.

I wasn’t done with diving yet though! This afternoon I was taking out my first refresher student!

In most parts of the diving world, if you haven’t dove in over 6 months, you need to take a refresher course to slowly get you back into the swing of things.

It’s a fairly straightforward course, you spend half of your first dive going over a handful of the open water skills and then the second half of the first dive is just a fun dive to practice buoyancy again.

The second dive is a fun dive and then after that you are able to do either another certification, course, or more fun dives!

By the time I got back to the hostel, I had to help finish packing my refreshers bag, find my student, and then go straight back to the boat.

My student today was Hannah from Australia! I ate my lunch while we chatted about her diving experience, travels, etc. I was excited to have my first refresher, not only to be teaching a little bit, but also it was cool to know this person already loved diving and just needed that little push to get them back into it.

I briefed Hannah about what we were going to do today. The skills were:

• 2 regulator clearing skills
• 2 regulator retrieval skills
• 2 mask clearing skills
• Air sharing
• Buoyancy pushups

I would show her the skill first and then have her repeat the skill. She absolutely smashed all of them and after 15 minutes we were already ready to go diving.

We ended up diving around mango bay for 71 minutes! Her buoyancy was really good and I could tell she was going to be perfectly fine on the second dive. This was definitely an easy first refresher to get my feet (fins?) wet on teaching these courses.

Our second dive was at Twins! This is actually a dive site I personally haven’t led since my advanced navigation back in early June. But I was ready for the challenge!

We moored up the boat in a part of the dive site called buoyancy world. This area has a bunch of concrete statues and shapes to practice diving around. They also double as artificial reefs as well!

But I didn’t want to start our dive here, so we surface swam to a buoy over Twins and descended there. I then took us around the dive site and after we explored it all, we made our way over to buoyancy world.

Before we did though, I actually saw another file fish!

Hannah was really enjoying the dive and honestly was a pretty good diving buddy. Never straying far away and always staying at my level.

We made it over to buoyancy world and dove around it for a bit exploring the different obstacles and diving through some as well.

Eventually I found a boat… I wasn’t sure if it was ours or not and as we ascended I was fairly confident it wasn’t. BUT sure enough, when we surfaced it was in fact our boat! I was very proud of myself for being able to navigate a new dive site without a slate showing me the map of the site AND that I was confident enough to try and make our way back to the boat. It was a good feeling!

We of course had to take a picture to commemorate taking out my first refresher and getting Hannah back into diving (after almost a year).

I was pretty dang tired by this point, but also really hungry… but I had no more Baht because I hadn’t had time to go to an ATM. So when I got back, I showered and ran to a couple different ATMs to find a working one, because for some reason, most were temporarily out of service.

I eventually found a working one and then met Chelsea and Kit at Blue Chair for a big meal of massaman curry and a mango smoothie.

I went from being very hungry to very full and I did want to go to bed. But I also wanted to go listen to Franco play some Latin music at bamboo bar. So we all headed over there and met up with some of our other friends from Taco!

We danced and shook our hips over the next hour to some fantastic Latin music. As always, I was smiling the entire time watching the band play so energetically and watching everyone that knew the songs sing along! It’s a fantastic way to spend a Sunday night.

We all slowly started to trickle back home and I made my way that way as well. But I first stopped by Echo Hostel to say hi to my friend Immy! I hadn’t seen her in a bit and her brother was visiting so I got to meet him and catch up with them.

I then went home and called it a night! I was exhausted, but I was going to get to sleep in because tomorrow is my day off! I’m definitely going to be relaxing for most of the day… 9 days straight of diving is very tiring. But I also have some to-dos to check off!

– Elie