Day 225! Exactly one week left until I’m done with my Dive Master certification! It’s pretty dang crazy how fast it’s gone by and how far I’ve come as a diver! Diving no where near done yet, but today I had a super nice day off hanging out with my DMT friends!

Today was my day off, so my plan was to sleep in. But at 6:30am my internal alarm clock woke me up for morning dives… which I didn’t need to go to.

I did see a text from my mother saying that she was with my grandparents and when I woke up we should FaceTime. So, since I was already awake, I thought, “no better time than the present.”

We had a lovely chat about what I’ve been up to, what they’ve been up to, and my upcoming plans! I’m so happy FaceTime exists so we can chat face to face from opposite sides of the world.

Fortunately, I was able to go back to sleep for a couple of hours after our FaceTime. When I woke up, I went to the ATM to pull out more money. Diving is an expensive hobby and I’ve paid for my DMT already. But one of the suggested certifications, Nitrox, isn’t included in the course.

Nitrox is a course that teaches you to dive with air concentrations containing higher levels of oxygen (anything above 21% oxygen to 40% oxygen). Why is this important? If I ever get a client in the future who has it, I’ll be able to dive with them, make the money from their dives, and take them on a safe dive.

Diving with higher levels of oxygen allows for longer dives but can also lead to oxygen toxicity on deep dives… it’s all science.

Enough people had told me it’s an important certification for a dive master to have. So I decided to pay the 4,000 Baht for it. It would be cheaper to do in Koh Tao, rather than Australia if a dive center told me I needed it. Also, I’m in the diving spirit now, why not get certified to have it forever.

I had a muesli bowl for breakfast while I paid for my course. And then I received a lot of love from the hostel dog, Taco!

His owner was off the island for a couple days, so he was being extra friendly since he missed her.

I played some pool against one of our freelance instructors, Lachi, played killer pool against the Taco Shack employees (I won 1 out of the 3 games we played), and then made my way back to my room to play guitar.

I was also waiting around for Kit to come back from his morning dives to grab lunch together.

Our friend Sina also joined us and told us she was planning on heading to Sai Thong beach later to hangout and snorkel. I had no other plans for the day, so I decided to tag along.

So a couple hours after lunch, we made our way to the beach!

It had been a while since I enjoyed time on the beach. Usually I’m too tired to go or since I’ve spent all morning/afternoon in the ocean I have no desire to do anything besides lay in the AC. But today, snorkeling sounded like a lot of fun!

I was told that a yellow box fish lived around Sai Thong and I’ve REALLY wanted to see one. But our luck wasn’t on our side for this… however, Sina and I had an insanely cool experience still!

Pretty early into our snorkel, out of nowhere I hear Sina squeal with excitement. I look over and she gave me the hand sign for turtle and pointed to the west. I couldn’t see it at first so I swam that direction and sure enough a HUGE turtle came out of nowhere!

The water was only 2 meters deep, so we were super close to it already while on the surface. But it started to swim and we followed it!

It then led us towards the north a bit where it met up with ANOTHER very large turtle. Sina saw them do a little greeting to each other! If this wasn’t cool enough, I heard Sina squeal again because ANOTHER turtle showed up too!

We had 3 ginormous turtles swimming with us out of no where, it was incredible!

One of the turtles strayed off so I followed it a bit and Sina followed the other two. The one I followed ended up surfacing right next to me which was super cool!

We eventually let the turtles go on their merry way. Sina and I gave each other a big high five and we were both so elated from the experience. We may not have seen the box fish, but we just saw three turtles hanging out, it was incredible.

When we got out of the water, Kit and young Chris arrived to hang out as well. We ended up playing cards for a bit, a game called Irish snap. We then got back in the water for a bit more snorkeling.

We didn’t see much this time around, so we got back out to play some Shithead!

A few hours later, we left the beach and made our way to Buddy restaurant. This is the restaurant that we walk through every day to get to the dock. The owner was happy to see us come back and we enjoyed another delicious meal of their yellow curry.

After dinner, we all separated for a bit to shower. We then met back up at Taco to hang out for the rest of the night. Pauline, James, and Gracie joined us as well for a bit too!

It was a great way to cap off a beautiful day off! Two back to back days of seeing turtles was pretty incredible too.

Tomorrow I’ll be fun diving with our newest DMT Tom! I’ll be taking him out around our dives and helping him get comfortable in the water. This experience has come full circle… it feels like yesterday Albert and Lydia were doing the exact same for me!

– Elie