Day 223! Well the morning boat didn’t make it to the pier today… so we had to improvise last minute to get as many of our customers diving in the morning as possible. I also spent the afternoon and evening with friends and it was a super nice way to cap off the day.

We had a somewhat exciting morning today. We got to the pier for our morning dives and the boat hadn’t pulled up to the dock yet… in fact, it wasn’t moving at all.

At first we couldn’t get in contact of the captain of our boat. So we thought the problem was him being asleep.

As we waited and waited, we eventually found out it was the battery. It was dead. So the boat probably wasn’t going anywhere. We waited some more and watched another boat come try to jumpstart/recharge our boat. But we had already waited an hour.

By this point, Iris, our manager, decided to put us on the Dive Point boat last minute. So we quickly ran to the other dock and hopped on the boat just a minute before it was set to leave.

Luckily the Dive Point boat was actually going to the two same dive sites we were supposed to. So we set off to HTMS Sattakut to go dive around the shipwreck and Hin Pee Wee.

I was guiding Michael again today. The visibility was decent again, so I took him to the bottom of the shipwreck to see the Jenkins ray. The school of massive trevally were still hunting the smaller school of fish, so Sattakut was just a wonderland of marine life! It’s quickly become one of my favorite dive sites as of late.

We had a solid 44 minute dive around both dive sites and made it back to the Dive Point boat. This boat has a “back on boat” time so it adds an extra thing to think about while diving. Sometimes it dictates when a dive needs to end even if we have air… which it did on our second dive.

Our second dive was very close to the first dive site. We were diving White Rock, one of my favorite dive spots in Koh Tao. We had to chill on the boat for an hour to give ourselves a good surface interval between diving and to make our second dive longer. But this cut into our dive time a little bit.

Since White Rock is a bit of a shallower dive site, we could also have a longer dive. So we dove around this beautiful site, seeing all varieties of fish and marine life.

But we ended up having to stop our dive just shy of an hour at 57 minutes because we were only 10 minutes away from our back on boat time.

During this dive there were some massive groups of new divers and they were constantly getting in our way. My friend Kiki was instructing an advanced course and she had the same experience during this dive. There was also a green turtle at the dive site today that I missed, but a lot of people on the boat (and afternoon boat today) saw!

Michael was alright today. There were a few times he strayed off to go look at something and he constantly was too close to me and my fins… but overall it was fine.

I made my way back to Taco Shack after the two dives. When I got back, my friend Pauline invited me to come over and hang out. We got a group together to enjoy the afternoon at her apartment, have some drinks, and also dye Kit’s hair! I also picked up lunch from taco and quickly stopped by my landlord to pay for my last month of living on Koh Tao.

Kits hair actually turned out pretty good! He got it dyed blue. I’m not sure what compelled him to dye it this color but he does pull it off.

We hung out for a long while and then Chris needed to go get a couple of his motorbikes from different mechanics across the island. So I joined him and helped him move the bikes back home.

I then went to Taco for a quick dinner and then made my way up to our secret sunset spot to watch another sunset.

This sunset wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the others recently, but it was still nice to hang out with friends and be outside.

I called it a night after the sun set. I went to my room and FaceTimed my friend Dylan for our weekly Monday chat. It was the perfect way to cap off another very nice day!

My mentor also told me and Kit that there’s a solid chance Taco Shack hires us after our DMT is finished! So we’ll be able to finally make money off of our fun divers and refreshers. It’s really nice to know they are liking what we are doing and how we are working. And also cool that they value our skills enough to pay us!

It’ll be a fun last month on the island!

– Elie