Day 232! Wow! Today’s the final day! 10 weeks of training and diving all coming to an end and wrapping up! After today I’ll be a Pro Diver and will be able to work all across the world as a dive master… maybe someday soon an instructor as well!

I woke up today for my last day of my DMT! I was excited to be diving, but of course a little sad it was coming to an end. However, just because my DMT is ending doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near done with diving!

This morning I was taking out my fun diver Tom and also our DMT Tom, Tom squared today! We were going to the exact same dive sites as yesterday, but I phrased it to Tom as a unique opportunity to see how dive sites can change from day to day.

Our first dive was at No Name Pinnacle, it was another nice dive there with incredible visibility, which I needed. I decided to try and swim from closer to our buoy line (which was far away from the shipwreck) because the waves were picking up, making the surface swim tough. I guess I got a little off course and saw the shipwreck a number of meters to the right of me. If it was worse visibility I might’ve missed it!

But we got there in the end and had a very nice 37 minute dive. After the dive Tom noted how much nicer it was to have the wreck to ourselves yesterday!

Our second dive was to Twins. There were a lot of big groups there this morning that unfortunately scared off a lot of the wildlife. In one case, I saw a group of 6-8 people all taking turns looking at a stingray. When we came back around a minute later to check it out ourselves, it was gone. A little annoying but what can you do!

We circled around the two pinnacles over 47 minutes and enjoyed crystal clear visibility at this dive site! It truly felt like I was swimming through a fish tank.

After the morning dives, I didn’t have too much time to relax. I was double boating for my last day and today I was teaching another refresher! This refresher actually requested me as their dive master because she met my friend Aaron while she was on Koh Phangan.

Lilly hadn’t dove in over 6 months and it’d been a while since she had gone over open water skills again (she was advanced certified). The day before she wasn’t super thrilled about having to go to class at 9am, but when I saw her at lunch she said she really enjoyed it and was glad she went! That was super nice to hear.

The time came to head back out to the boats and today, I was on a new boat… well, kind of new. I was back on the original Taco Shack boat!

I’ve missed this yellow beauty and it was nice to end my diving training on the boat it all began on!

Our first dive was at Mango Bay. The waves were still fairly choppy but we didn’t have too many skills to do, so it wasn’t a big problem for us. Some of the open water students, who had an hour of skills to do, got sea sick in the water from the surge on the shoreline.

But Lilly crushed the skills! We wrapped them up in 13 minutes before starting the rest of our hour dive. This time around I went over air sharing a number of times with her on the surface before doing it in the water. This proved very helpful and I’ll definitely be doing this in the future when I teach refreshers.

The rest of the dive we spent around the south wall of the bay. It’s such a beautiful dive and the visibility was amazing again! We saw some giant groupers, lots of groupers and travelly hunting small schools of fish, and there were lots of random fish scattered about. At one point I swore I saw something that looked like a dolphin… I was convinced. But after staring at it perplexed for a minute it turned out to be the sun reflecting strangely off a rock… whoops!

We finished up our dive and got back on to the boat for our second dive.

Our second dive originally was going to be twins… again. But because of the waves, we changed it to light house pinnacle. Now I wasn’t super thrilled on this, because my last (and only) experience at this dive site was sub par. BUT it blew me out of the water today… not literally.

This dive was absolutely gorgeous.

We immediately dropped on top of a turtle, WILD. Then we swam around a deeper part of the dive site which was beautiful with clear visibility, last time I was here there was terrible visibility. We also saw a blue spotted stingray flutter about, right before that we saw a puffer fish hiding, and then right before that we saw a large school of barracudas!! It was crazy!

For the majority of the dive though, I had a very faint idea where we were at. But funnily enough, I stumbled upon the boat just as I was about to end the dive. A nice and lucky feeling!

When we finished the dive, Lilly was super happy, which of course made me happy! She was very glad she had met Aaron, that we got put in touch, and she decided to dive. She honestly lucked out a lot on the second dive, but it got her really excited to dive more! Unfortunately she leaves Koh Tao, so it won’t be with me but I hope she does dive again before 6 months go by!

When I got back home, I showered and met up with a nice group of my friends to celebrate finishing my DMT. We drank a bit at Taco before heading out to dinner at Bingo.

It was really nice spending the evening with all of them and eventually I went out to one of the bars, called the local, to meet up with some more friends. It was karaoke night, so we listened and sang along with all the singers.

Eventually I called it a night, as tomorrow I’m facing my final test as I enter the professional diving world… the snorkel test!

– Elie