Day 217! Today was a pretty standard day of diving and having the afternoon off. Sometimes when I’m not diving though, I don’t know what to do with my day. Today I made some time for myself and also spent time hanging out with friends. On top of that I had two great dives, I can’t complain about my day at all!

Time for more fun diving! Over the next two weeks, I’ll be getting my fix of fun divers and refreshers. By the time I’m done, I’ll be more than ready to take on the professional world of diving!

Today I was taking out two fun divers Sunil and Stefanie. I had led Sunil a time or two and Kit had led Stefanie before, so I knew I was in for a nice morning of good diving.

The schedule today said two dives at the dive site No Name… now in most cases I’d be a little confused, because no name isn’t great enough to do twice. But there was a shipwreck penetration certification happening and they needed to dive the same shipwreck twice. So instead of diving the shipwreck and No Name both times, the rest of us were going to do the dive site Twins for the second dive.

This would require us to swim through the big blue back to the boat… but we’ll get to that on the second dive.

We started at HTMS Suphairin, one of the WWII ships that was sunk around the island. We could see the wreck from the surface, which was awesome. But as we descended down to the bottom of the wreck, the visibility wasn’t great. So we dove underneath the front of the ship (it’s at an angle so you can dive under it) and then made our way back up, circling the wreck, and then we headed to No Name to finish out the dive.

There wasn’t anything super special about this dive, but it was a very nice 44 minute dive with these two fun divers!

We wrapped up our first dive and got back onto the boat. We didn’t have to move dive sites since twins was a fairly short surface swim away. So we hung out on the boat for just under an hour to give us time to release nitrogen to make our next dive longer.

Our second dive was actually very pretty! I enjoy Twins and I don’t get to go to it often. But over the past couple days I’ve had two really good dives there!

Today felt like I was diving through an aquarium. The visibility was pretty good and there was a ton of wildlife swimming about!

A couple fish we saw of note, a seal face puffer fish (the second one I’ve ever seen), a harlequin sweet lips, and a fairly big blue spotted stingray (which I didn’t take a picture of).

The dive ended up being under an hour without any hiccups… except at the beginning of the dive. I made an incorrect judgement call on where we descended and thought I was making my way around the west pinnacle… but in fact I was making my way around the east pinnacle, which was much shallower.

I quickly corrected my mistake and it wasn’t the end of the world, but it also wasn’t what I was intending. We also got to see the seal faced puffer fish because of it, so I’d call it a happy accident!

To finish up the dive, we had a bit of a swim into the deep blue to find the boat. Since we had to surface swim a few minutes to the dive site, we had about a 4-6 minute swim directly west into the blue ocean that had nothing but sand. It was a nice test of my navigational skills!

We eventually found a boat and I was pretty excited, because it looked like ours. I then saw some other divers going towards the boat and in my head I thought “haha suckers, you’re at the wrong boat.” But then I saw them start climbing up the ladder… and then I thought “oh wait, I’m the sucker, I’m at the wrong boat.”

We were already mid ascent so it was too late to correct it… but it just turned out I went to the boat that was moored up onto our boat. So I wasn’t far off at all!

We wrapped up our dives and both Sunil and Stefanie were super stoked with how beautiful the second dive was. They’ve both been diving a lot with Taco and are heading out tomorrow, so I’m glad they got a nice final dive!

We made our way back to Taco Shack and I helped clean up gear before heading back home to shower. I went back to Taco for food and while I was eating I noticed the divers had left a bag of food for our boat boy and captain.

I quickly ran into the dive office to see if the boat had left yet and it hadn’t. So I hopped on my motorbike and raced to the pier to catch them before they left! I’m fairly close with our boat boy and I would hate knowing that he didn’t get lunch because someone forgot it at the hostel.

Luckily, I caught the boat just before it left! It was definitely an inconvenience to drive all the way to the pier, but I was very glad I could help!

I finished eating and then headed to my room for a nice long nap.

When I finally woke up, I played some guitar. And then I hopped back over to the hostel to play some pool with the workers and my friend Chris (the DMT).

I was getting pretty hot from standing outside playing pool. So I went into the dive shop to hang out with some of the instructors and sit in the AC.

I chatted with them for a while but they had a meeting. So I made my way up to the secret viewpoint near Taco Shack and enjoyed some alone time listening to music.

I also enjoyed watching a storm quickly roll in… so my sunset watching ended after a half an hour. I got back to Taco just in time for it to start torrentially downpouring.

I then played more pool, chatted with my friends (and instructors) Tom, Guada, and Chris, and had a very good dinner of chicken gra pow from the hostel.

I finished off the night by getting my but kicked 1-3 in pool by my friend Myo. After that, I went back to my room to call it an early night!

Tomorrow I’ll be leading more fun divers around Southwest Pinnacle and potentially Shark Island! We’ll see if the current coorporates for us.

– Elie