Day 227! The countdown begins, 6 more days of my dive master training. After the 21st I’ll officially be a dive master and can turn scuba diving into a full time job! It’s pretty crazy I started in May and have come so far. I had some wonderful dives today as well and hit a new milestone in the number of dives I’ve done!

Today was going to be a fun day on the morning boat. All of the DMTs were on the morning schedule and it’d be the first time the new team would be all together.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t dive with them in the morning because I had a last minute fun diver. But I wasn’t too upset because it was my friend Nui, from Taco Shack!

Our first dive was to Southwest Pinnacle… and WOW was it gorgeous. We immediately spotted stingrays and the giant school of fish. But throughout the dive we just saw cooler and cooler things.

We found a baby stingray, a very large hermit crab, and a juvenile sweet lips!

On top of that the visibility was superb. It was just an all around amazing first dive of the day!

There was a tiny bit of current around the dive site, but not enough to deter us from going to our second dive spot. We were headed to Shark Island!

This ended up being another really special dive. Not only was it my 150th dive, but I saw something very rare to Koh Tao.

Pretty quickly into the dive I saw, what I originally thought was a grouper, lurking under a coral… it was pretty dang big, so I decided to get a closer look. I quickly realized it in fact wasn’t a grouper, it was a giant eel! This kind of eel is not common in Koh Tao at all and is very common in Indonesia. I was so excited to see such a large eel and luckily my mentor, Chris, was around to share the excitement.

He was shocked when he saw it, it was one of the first he’s seen in Koh Tao (he dove in Indonesia for a while so he has seen a ton of them). Thankfully he caught a much better video than I did and it really captures how big the head of this eel is!

Not only did we see the giant eel, we saw a couple harlequin sweet lips (the adult version of the baby we saw at Southwest). We also found the giant school of batfish again! This time though, we were able to swim with them since they were deeper!

It was incredible being surrounded by such beautiful fish.

At the end of the dive, I was taking us back to the boat, when I saw a big shadow on the ground that I swore was being cast by our boat. As I looked closer I realized that it was actually a giant school of barracudas! I’m talking hundreds!

It’s really really hard to see but it’s there, I promise!

With those two dives down, the morning was complete.

We went back to Taco, I took a shower, and then had some lunch.

Post lunch, I went to my room for a nap and to play some guitar. But when 3pm rolled around, it was time for class.

Today Kit and I had our Nitrox course! We only had the academic portion today. In a couple of days, we will go to a tank supplier, watch them fill up our Nitrox tanks, and then go on our Nitrox dives!

After our hour of class, it was time to help lead a Taco Shack beach cleanup. But no one showed up… I don’t think the organizer did a great job of promoting it, so we postponed it for another day and to loop in the hostel managers as well. Hopefully next time more people will come!

Instead, I stuck around and played pool with Chris. But eventually, it was time to dive on my second boat of the day, the night dive. I asked Chris yesterday if I could do the night dive and he said yes. He also added all of the DMTs to the boat, so this time I was able to go on the DMT dive.

We didn’t have many students on the boat, so we went to the dive site, Pottery. We saw almost 10 different blue spotted stingrays and two pufferfish! We were also able to see the bioluminescent plankton fairly well tonight too!

This was a fun dive and a nice way to end the evening… but I was super tired afterwards. I got home, showered, and then had dinner at Taco Shack.

After dinner, my friend Pauline was wanting to hang out for a little bit before she left. So I went over to say “see you later” before heading off to bed!

It was another fantastic day. It was filled with some amazing dives and getting educated on a new way of diving, Nitrox.

It’s sad my friends Pauline and James are leaving the island, but I’ll be doing the same soon enough!

– Elie