Day 240! where’s the time going?! It’s almost the end of August! But 240 days of traveling so far, not bad! Today I had a paid double boat. I had two fun divers in the morning, one being our favorite fun diver Michael… and then I had a friend doing a refresher course with me in the afternoon!

It was a full boat this morning, meaning we were going to one of our deep dive sites today! It’s been since the Sail Rock trip that I’ve had the chance to do a deep site outside of the shipwrecks. I was excited! Also the opportunity to see a whale shark was much higher today too.

Until we got on the boat and started heading towards Chumphon Pinnacle… the boat engine started making noises and we could tell we were not going to be able to make it that far today.

So we unfortunately had to change dive sites to No Name Pinnacle/HTMS Suphairin 313… for the third day in a row. I felt bad for my fun diver Flavio, but the decision was out of my control. Michael wasn’t too pleased but was going to dive with us still.

Our first dive started out fine. We descended down to the bottom of the shipwreck and then started to circle it. But because Flavio had been to this dive site the last couple of days, I decided to check out more of the little pinnacle and surrounding rocks nearby.

While we were over there… Michael takes a metal stick he has (for tapping on his tank) and uses it to pick up a crown of thorns starfish. A very poisonous starfish. These starfish are very destructive to the corals and ecosystem because their natural predator is the trigger fish and they sometimes don’t know how to flip them over.

So I was expecting Michael to just flip the starfish over, not something we should be doing in Koh Tao, but I was just going to talk with him afterwords. There ARE some places in the world that pay people to flip them, but not here.

Instead of flipping it though we starts carrying it. And I lost it. I was banging my tank with my torch to get his attention and I used my hands to demand him to put it down.

He did, thankfully, and we continued the dive. He also just wouldn’t stay on my depth level and constantly was far below us… which in turn made me have to tell him to come up many many times.

After a bit of a frustrating dive, we got back to the surface and I told him “if you ever touch any marine life again, I don’t care how bad it is for the environment. I will be immediately canceling the dive.” He then started arguing with me a bit about why he was doing it and that some other instructor told him to do it… and I said, that wasn’t me and on these dives you’re with me.

We got back on the boat and talked it out a bit more and he said he wouldn’t do it again while diving with me.

Our second dive was at White Rock and I had never seen the visibility so bad here. It was like a double whammy that we didn’t get to go to Chumphon and now this beautiful dive site was hard to see.

We still made our way around, Michael was much better this dive, and Flavio actually really enjoyed the dive because the visibility was still better than the lakes he dives at home.

On the way back to the pier, I think the boat almost ran one of fuel. So we were stranded for a couple minutes. Then our Cappy worked his magic and we made it into the pier.

I then went back to Taco Shack to scarf down my lunch, because today, I was double boating!

My refresher in the afternoon was Dom! He’s a friend of mine and actually lives in Melbourne, so we’ll be hanging out in Australia soon enough. He got his open water 11 months ago at Taco Shack and finally was going to use it again.

Sina wanted to hang out on the boat, but on the way to Mango Bay, a huge storm rolled in and made us all soaked and cold. So Sina decided to join us on our dives today. It was fine by me, so she did just that.

Thankfully, the water was really hot still, so we escaped the storm. The skills took about 13 minutes and then we went fun diving around the bay.

Dom was really impressed by all the different fish and was pointing them out all excitedly. We also saw a blue spotted stingray on this dive. That always gets new divers really excited. I’m still a big fan of them, but I’ve seen so many now!

That was a nice, almost hour, dive. We then changed our second dive from the west side of the island to the east side, due to the wind. So we went to Light House bay.

Dom was really happy with the dive this far and was very happy he decided to do his refresher.

I picked up one more diver for this dive, my DMT friend Chris. So I ended up guiding all three of them.

We didn’t see the turtle today (other groups did), but we saw huge King Marcel’s, schools of rabbit and parrot fish, the big school of barracuda, and multiple stingrays.

I got a crazy video of the barracudas darting away too!

It was really fun guiding these three and also very nice I got to refresh a friend!

I forgot to snag a picture with him and neglected to snag a picture of dinner as well.

Sina, Chris, Tom, and I went to Buddy restaurant after we showered and my favorite Thai mama was excited to see us. She even brought out pineapple for us as well! So sweet of her.

After enjoying my yellow curry with a fried egg, I gave her a hug, and said I’d come by again very soon. We were all ready for bed, but it was Sina’s second to last night on the island, so we wanted to spend a bit more time all together.

We ventured over to a bar called Baby Rasta. None of us had really been here before, but I had heard about it. We ventured our way into the hippy maze of a bar and enjoyed the next couple of hours.

We started talking about favorite birthdays and it jogged my memory of my funky town birthday party a few years ago, my friends kidnapping me after I quit my job, and then this last one where Chira, my friend Aaron’s girlfriend, cooked me an entire feast.

But eventually, it was time for bed!

Tomorrow I do not have any clients, Sina will be taking them out. So I will be fun diving on the pro-list instead!

– Elie