Day 220! Today I had a very exciting afternoon of diving. One of the receptionists at Taco Shack, a friend of mine, was finally getting back into diving after 5 years!! So I was going to be her refresher teacher today.

I didn’t have any fun divers this morning so after my fun night out I was able to finally sleep in a bit.

When I woke up, I finished up my blog post from yesterday and then got ready for my day. Today I was teaching my second refresh course! It was a special one today too, because I was teaching one of my friends who works at Taco Shack, Nui!

I’ve known Nui since my first day at Taco and if I remember correctly, she was the first person I spoke to asking if I could volunteer at the hostel!

I went over to the hostel for breakfast and got the classic, muesli bowl.

This is always such a treat now since I am usually diving during breakfast time. Don’t get me wrong though, I love my fried chicken breakfasts just the same.

I then hung around the hostel playing some pool and chatting with the dive instructors. Usually I’d have to help with setting up bags, but one of the instructors had gotten their schedules mixed up, had nothing else to do, so he did it all before we could get there.

11am rolled around and it was time for lunch before heading out to the pier. Today’s lunch was stir fried vegis and I had mine with tofu. We also had a fun chat between some of the instructors and DMTs about all the odd hobbies we had growing up. Most (if not all) of us were the type to try something out for a bit and then move on to the next hobby. AND a lot of us could juggle too, which is always fun to find out!

We set out for the boat and when we got there I helped Nui set up her equipment. It was her first time diving in 5 years!! But she had over 70 logged dives so I knew she had a lot of experience already.

The refresher was definitely helpful for her since she had forgotten some steps to setting up the equipment, hand signals, etc. But she was an incredible diver and made my life very easy today.

Our first dive ended up being 69 minutes at Aow Leuk. The first 20 was spent at 1.5m doing the 8 different skills we have to reteach them. Nui smashed them all! We had to run through air sharing a couple times to get it down, but in the end she did a great job!

We then went on a fun dive around the north side of the bay. We dove for so long that we hit parts of the bay that I had never seen before! We saw a tiny moray eel in a hole in the sand (at the bottom of the sea…). We also saw a ton of groupers hunting with a long face emperor fish and a larger moray eel. Nui’s dive position was super good and so was her air consumption.

We got to a point on the dive that I decided it was time to end the dive even though we both still had plenty of air. But it had already been a super long dive… so neither of us were upset to “end it early.”

I was thoroughly impressed with Nui’s diving! I knew it also meant that our second dive was going to be very fun!

We made our way to Tanote Bay. The dive was just as pretty as yesterday. It had a lot kiss stingrays, but it still was a great dive.

We got to hang around the big school of fish, I found the motorbike for a fun picture op for Nui, and I got up close and personal with a giant grouper getting cleaned by a cleaner wrasse.

This dive lasted 58 minutes and we probably could’ve gone for another 20 minutes at least!

I was really happy with how Nui did! There was only one thing that wasn’t great.

We were coming up on a diving group who had just found a nudibranch. I knew Nui liked them so I let her know it was there. She then decided to go into the middle of this random group to take a photo of the nudibranch.

It wasn’t great, but it was quite funny. Their instructor was so confused and I tried to apologize underwater the best I could, but no harm was done so it just gave me a good laugh and a little bit of frustration to the other instructor.

I told Nui about this after the dive and she thought the instructor was one of Taco’s which is why she did that… but unfortunately it was not!

With those two dives done, Nui was now ready to take back on the world of diving! It was super fun to help her with her refresher and I hope we get to do more dives together before I leave the island.

We also had a wonderful view of the sunset on our boat ride back to the pier.

I then went home to shower before meeting up with my friend Chelsea for dinner at a restaurant near Taco called Mint. No one else was around for dinner so we chatted for a bit while we ate. We were both really tired so that’s where the night ended. I went home, got ready for bed, and then called it a night.

There wasn’t anything for me to do work wise on the schedule for tomorrow. So I asked my mentor, Chris, if I could be thrown on the schedule to fun dive! Tomorrow we are going to both wreck dive sites, so I’m looking forward to seeing what crazy things we’ll see!

Here are some pictures from Chelsea’s camera from last night:

– Elie