Day 237! Today was another day of afternoon dives. I had one refresher student today who hadn’t dove in over 5 years! I also enjoyed a beautiful sunset, hung out with friends, and overall had another great day on Koh Tao.

With the mishap of last nights scheduling, I had no fun divers this morning. So I got to sleep in, which was needed after karaoke night and the amount of diving I’ve been doing.

But when I got up and went to Taco Shack… I found out the morning boat saw a FREAKING WHALE SHARK!

Now if I had been on the boat, would we have seen it? Who knows… but man, that would’ve been nice to see! We were all very envious but also very happy for them and all the new divers that got to see it. Apparently it was with them at the beginning of the dive and then came back to say hi during their safety stop too!

I was also paid this morning by my manager, Iris, for my fun divers and refreshers from the past couple of days. I’m getting paid 300 baht per fun diver and 450 baht per refresher. So not a ton, but it’s already adding up quick! I’m also not paying to dive when I get paid, so there’s that included too! Pretty cool and very nice to receive a wad of cash for my efforts now.

After eating lunch, it was time to teach another refresher course. Today I had Joe, a traveler from England. He hadn’t dove in 5 years, so it was going to be another interesting lesson. He was a super nice guy and was excited to get back in the water.

Our first dive was in Aow Leuk again, since the wind is still being persistent on the west side of the island. It only took us 13 minutes to get through our skills and since we went through air sharing a bunch of times on the surface, Joe smashed it first try under water.

Joe wasn’t the strongest swimmer, but he did a good job keeping his buoyancy around the corals. We also stumbled into a school of barracudas on the fun dive part of the dive, which I’ve never seen at Aow Leuk before! I wonder why they were there…?

We had a nice hour dive and got ready for our second dive, at Tanote Bay!

It’d been a bit since I had been to this dive site and I was excited to take Joe to see the giant school of fish.

We descended down and headed towards the school and the sunken motorbike.

This dive was still very long, 50+ minutes, and we got to explore practically the entire dive site!

Joe had a blast at this one and said he felt a lot more confident from the first to second dive. Which is good to hear!

We finished up and then made our way back to Taco Shack. I then showered and went back to the lobby to snag a quick chicken taco before heading to Maya Beach Bar with friends we wanted to catch sunset.

I ran into my friend Lottie at the bar, so I hung out with her, her brother, and her brother’s girlfriend for a little bit. But then I went and joined my diving friends for the rest of the sunset.

After the sun fully set, we went to Buddy restaurant for dinner. Bee was very happy to see us again and so were her puppies.

I had another amazing yellow curry with a fried egg and then it was time for bed

It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks of diving. But now I’m getting paid and I’m trying to hit 200 dives before I leave. I’m looking forward to seeing what these last two weeks on the island has in store for me!

– Elie