Day 235! Here we go! We’re now diving 😉 into the world of professional diving. Today I took out my first paid customers. Not only was it a special day for that, but we were also taking a trip out to Sail Rock, a dive site I’d never been to before.

I got to sleep in this morning, which was much needed after my past couple late nights. But I woke up at 8am to have time to get ready, eat, and pack my fun divers bags.

I got myself a muesli bowl from Taco Shack to start my day and waited for the rest of the dive team to show up. Today we were taking a special trip out to Sail Rock. This dive site is a couple hours away from Koh Tao so we’d be doing a double dive at it. Sail Rock is known for its giant schools of fish, chimney swim through, and wayyy higher chances of seeing a whale shark.

My fun divers today were Constantine, who has been fun diving with us for a bit now and got certified at Taco Shack last year. As well as Michael… he’s back and ready for more dives! Turns out he’s been sick, which is probably why I hadn’t heard from him.

We had a lot to bring on this trip, all our diving gear, lunches, waters, fruits, etc. so it took us a bit longer to get out of the pier. But we were off on our journey before 10:30am.

It was a long boat ride out to the dive site but there was a lot of excitement in the air. A whale shark had been spotted the past two days at Sail Rock and we were all hoping to get our shot at seeing this beautiful creature.

We dove in around noon and descended down to a gorgeous gorgeous dive site.

For our first dive I intended on finding the chimney swim through and descend into it. The chimney swim through is a fairly large hole in the rock that makes up Sail Rock. It has an entrance/exit at 6m, 12m, and 18m and once you’re in the chimney it’s fairly wide and you can see to the surface.

I don’t know exactly where this chimney was and was aiming for the 12m entrance but when we found it I decided to just continue on with our dive and use it as a way to ascend at the end.

The visibility was amazing as we made our way around the entire rock. We saw a huge school of barracuda, ginormous school of bat fish, loads of giant groupers, and just lots of fish! It was beautiful!

There wasn’t much current either, only the south and north side had a tiny bit of a swell but outside of that we were current free.

Towards the back half of the dive I decided to turn around and head back towards the chimney. Originally I was going to go all the way around the rock, but I realized the direction we were heading was going to take us too shallow. So I made the call to backtrack to the chimney instead.

Michael now has his own compass and didn’t understand why I was turning around. He tried to tell me I was going the wrong way and proceeded to give me the “correct” directions. I looked at him, motioned that he was following me and I was guiding… I was pretty frustrated that he stopped the dive for that and didn’t trust my guiding.

We then made our way to the chimney, exited out at the 6m mark, deployed my SMB, and did our safety stop before ascending.

When we reached the surface I told Michael that he needs to trust my judgement and that I’m leading. I also explained why I did what I did and he went “oh, that was a good call…” yes Michael, I know it was.

Also throughout the dive I’d turn away for 10 seconds and he’d somehow wander off… it was annoying to say the least. But it was a fun dive overall outside of the headache.

During our surface interval we had a lunch of chicken fried rice. We listened to music, chatted about our dive, and hoped we were going to catch a glimpse of a whale shark the next dive. Spoiler alert, we did not.

Instead we dropped down onto a “secret pinnacle” to start our second dive. This was just another decently sized rock a minute swim away from the main pinnacle. This ended up being an amazing decision because it was absolutely stunning.

We swam into some huge schools of big eye travelly, oxyeye scad, and stumbled onto one of the largest groupers I’ve ever seen!

We also dove into another insanely large school of barracuda and they ended up circling us as we passed through.

We ended up seeing some very large queen fish, but they were busy hunting and I didn’t get a good picture of them.

We continued our dive around the main pinnacle and ended our dive again by going up the chimney.

Even though we didn’t see a whale shark, we still had two FANTASTIC dives! I see why people love Sail Rock… but I think Southwest Pinnacle and Chumphon Pinnacle have it best still. I was very happy though to check off another new dive site!

We had a really nice crew of divers out with us today and we celebrated with a beer on our long boat ride back to the island.

It took us around 2.5 hours to get back to the pier. But it was a nice ride of chit chat and laughter.

Once we got back to Taco, we cleaned and hung up the gear. After I went home, showered, and then came back to Taco for dinner.

I ended up sitting at Taco the rest of the night, hanging out with big Chris, Kit, big and little Tom, Sina, and Yi. It was a lovely way to cap off the day.

Kit unfortunately leaves the island for a bit in a couple days. So tomorrow we’ll be morning diving to try and squeeze some more dives in before he goes. He’ll be coming back but it will basically be the day I’m leaving. I’ll also have a couple refreshers to take out in the afternoon.

The Kit and Elie show is coming to a close… for now!

– Elie