Day 234! I may be a dive master now, but I definitely was not diving today. It was a very sluggish day but it ended on a very nice note!

Well… as you probably can imagine after the snorkel test, I was very hungover.

It was worth it though because it was a blast of a night and one I’ll remember for a very long time!

Sina, Kit, and I were all in the same boat and definitely not diving today. I woke up periodically throughout the morning but kept falling back asleep. Eventually we all found the energy and will to get up and we met at Taco Shack for brunch around 11:30am.

We had a good laugh this morning about how disheveled we all looked and reminisced on the nights shenanigans.

While we were eating, I noticed I got an email from SSI saying I was missing my medical document so I couldn’t be certified yet. This was odd because I had uploaded it when I started but something must’ve happened to it in the app. So I had to scramble to find it in my phone, fill out a few forms, and then got it uploaded.

I told my manager and she resubmitted my certification, and a little while later, I was officially a pro diver!

It’s pretty nuts I have 163 dives! My goal is to get that number as close to 200 as I can before I leave. But I’m still very happy and proud with how many I’ve done so far!

I then made my way back home to sleep the rest of the morning and early afternoon.

I woke up and decided to go eat more food, so I crawled my way back to Taco and had a very tasty chicken gra pao.

I then… made my way back home and worked on my blog post for the day before.

Eventually my mentor, Chris, asked Kit and I if we wanted to go to bamboo bar to watch the sunset. But just before we were about to meet up with that, he texted us again saying he found a place we could analyze nitrox tanks.

A few days ago, Kit and I did our Nitrox training with Chris. Nitrox is any tank composition having a percentage of oxygen higher than 21%. One of the most important parts about Nitrox diving is making sure your tank has the percentage of oxygen you want.

This is because oxygen can become toxic while you’re diving with the deeper you go. So you need to be present at the tank facility to see your tank being filled up properly, so you can have a safe dive.

With watching a tank be analyzed, we were now officially Nitrox certified. Before I leave the island I’ll do a dive with Chris using Nitrox tanks to see what it’s like to dive with different compositions.

We then went to bamboo bar to watch the sunset.

We chatted for a while about life and diving. I’m very glad Chris was our mentor and I’m happy to have him as a friend. He taught me a ton about diving and pushed Kit and I to be professional in and out of the water.

Watching the sunset was a really nice way to end off the day. And to wrap it all up, we went to buddy restaurant to enjoy an amazing meal of yellow curry.

It was a lazy day, but still a very nice day. Tomorrow, I’ll be having my first dives where I’M GETTING PAID! We are taking one of our boats on a special trip to Sail Rock… but more on that tomorrow!

– Elie