Day 233! WOW! The day is finally here… my snorkel test. The snorkel test is one of diving cultures many traditions. It is the final test to bring new dive masters into the professional world of diving! The main event is chugging a drink through a snorkel bong, but there’s usually a number of different games and challenges that lead up to it. Here’s how ours went…

After a fun night out celebrating the completion of my dive master training, I decided to sleep in. I was taking the day off from diving to rest up for the big night ahead of me.

I’ve watched a couple snorkel tests already and knew what I was in for… I was excited and nervous but I knew it was going to be a fun time.

When I finally decided to get out of bed, I headed over to Taco Shack to eat some breakfast. The kitchen was closed till 11am since they were preparing food for the divers, so I sat with the dive team and chatted with them.

Eventually I was able to get a chicken gra pao which has quickly become one of my favorite meals at Taco Shack.

It’s a rare occurrence that almost the entire team is around at once and we took a really nice group picture!

After all the divers went out for the afternoon, I went to New Haven, a restaurant, with Kit and Chelsea to join them while they had lunch.

We had a very nice time chatting and then we all hopped on our motorbikes and went out on an errand. Our friend Sina joined us for this too because we were in search of body paint for our snorkel test tonight.

The theme was nudibranchs, which are the extraterrestrial looking sea slugs I’ve talked about in past posts. And we were going to paint ourselves to look like them… you’ll see how it turned out in a bit.

We went store to store and couldn’t find anything… luckily the last store we tried had it!

We parted ways for a bit after that. I tried to go to buddy restaurant for an early dinner, but it was closed, so I went to mama Tam’s for one of my favorite meals on the island.

I then met back up at Kit’s apartment to get ready for the night’s festivities.

For the snorkel test, I was representing the Phyllidia Varicosa, also known as the wart slug. People really didn’t pick up on what we were but we still had a fun time getting “dressed up” for the occasion.

We showed up to the hostel around 7pm, but the festivities didn’t start till after 8pm. But it became a wild night very quickly.

Before we get into this, this was all done voluntarily, none of us were forced to do anything. It was a wild night but a very special and fun one surrounded by the people who helped us throughout our training!

The night was hosted by Chelsea, Sina’s mentor. Chris, mine and Kit’s mentor, was on hand ready to hand out drinks to the losers of each game.

The first round was a question round. Everyone in the audience was able to ask us ANY question, mainly diving related. If we got it wrong, we had to drink… and we got a lot of questions wrong, pretty much all of them. But there were a few we got right and then the audience member had to drink.

Some of the questions were “how many 7elevens are on Koh Tao,” “what does SCUBA stand for,” “what components are needed to calculate SAC rate,” etc.

We went through 3 bottles of soju very quickly in this round…

The next game was never have I ever. This one could’ve gone in a number of different directions. But the audience kept it rather tame and stuck with diving related questions. But every time we had done one of the things, we had to drink. And of course we drank almost every time.

After a short break, the next round was a blindfolded equipment setup race, with a twist. We had to pick an instructor to mess with our tank while we were setting it up. So even if we finished a step, they could undo it or take things apart… and we’d have no idea till we double checked.

I chose Tom, which ended up being a good pick because he did mess with me, a lot, but he still wanted to win so eventually he let me make a lot of progress. But it was a battle. Every time I’d finish a step, he’d put it back to the beginning or knot something up so it was incorrect. At one point, one of the instructors dumped ice water on us too, felt like I was back in ten stress and rescue.

But after a long fought battle, I was the first to finish!

I wasn’t expecting to win because Kit usually beats me at setting up, but Kit chose Chris as his instructor and Chris went very tough on him.

Our next challenge was probably the one most people were excited to see (outside of the snorkel chug of course). It was performing a diving skill but as a sexy dance.

As a dive master, we teach refresher courses so we know how to instruct specific skills. However, we had all skills at our disposal on this one and I actually had a skill in mind ever since I watched my first snorkel test. I haven’t seen anyone do it, but I thought it’d be perfect for this part of the night.

We had to choose an instructor again to perform the skill on. I chose Tom again because I knew he’d play along and also because no one had chose him at the past snorkel tests. And for my skill, I chose unconscious diver underwater. This skill has the person playing unconscious diver face down on the floor.

I volunteered to go first and whipped out my sexy dance moves while going through each step of the skill. Everyone was whooping and hollering, it was very funny. I’ll eventually have a video to share of it, but I currently do not have it.

Kit chose Theo and did cramp removal, another great choice for the challenge. And Sina chose Guada and did air sharing, the classic choice for this part of the snorkel test. It was all very goofy and everyone was laughing and having a great time.

After another break, the next challenge was the one I wasn’t looking forward to at all… we had a plate of baking flour in front of us and hidden in it were 7 candies. We had to move each candy from the plate to a cup on our chair, but we only could use our mouths. First one to move them all would win!

It was a scramble to find them inside the flour, but I used my nose to sweep the flour around to find the candies… and then I had to get a mouthful of flour to get it out. It honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I had dough forming in all the crevices of my mouth.

There was one point where Kit dropped one on the floor and had to scramble around to find it with his mouth, which was hilarious. Also my friend Theo kept messing with me during the challenge so I ended up sending some flour his way… whoopsies!

Eventually I thought I had finished but only counted 6 so I had to find one more and then, because I took them all out of my cup to count, had to put them all back in the cup.

BUT… the effort wasn’t for nothing because I ended up winning this challenge too!

We took another break to clean up all the flour off ourselves and when we came back, it was time for the main event. The snorkel chug!

For our last challenge, we had to choose one more instructor, they would be the one pouring our drink down the funnel.

I wanted to get Chris involved with one of my challenges since he was my mentor. So I chose him to be the one to pour my drink. Kit chose Kevin and Sina chose Kiki! We put on our masks, put the snorkel into our mouth, and it was go time.

It had been a long time since I had drank through a funnel, probably since college. But having the addition of a mask over the nose definitely made it harder. The challenge went very quickly and luckily none of us threw up.

But in the end… mom and dad, you’ll be proud to know… I was the fastest chugger and won the race.

Now it’s not all about winning and we all embraced each other after we were done. But I did rub it in both of their faces that I won.

Everyone congratulated us and the festivities continued with hanging out at Taco Shack, chatting with everyone that came.

A small group of us headed out to a couple of the bars to continue the night and then around 2am I made my way back home and went to bed.

It was such a fun night and honestly so crazy that 10 weeks flew by that fast. It’s also crazy that I’m now a professional diver! There’s no way I could have known my journey would lead me to this point, but I’m excited to see where this new skill takes me.

Over the next two and a half weeks, I’ll be earning money from diving! And then… off on stage two of my traveling adventure!

– Elie