Day 242! Well, the day has come… it’s time to say see you later to Sina, one of my close friends on the island. So this morning I dove and then this afternoon I spent the rest of my time with her and other friends

After an exciting morning at Green Rock yesterday, all of the instructors wanted a crack at seeing a whale shark.

So for our morning of dives today, we kicked off at Green Rock and I was leading my friend Dom. Dom just did his refresher course with me and I was looking forward to leading him on some dives today.

Since he’s only open water certified, we couldn’t go past 18m, but that wasn’t a problem on our first dive.

We descended into the ocean and we were met with some pretty subpar visibility. On top of that, there wasn’t a whale shark… but there were a lot of boats trying to dive at the dive site today. Makes sense!

We circled the dive site and hit the swim throughs that it has hidden within. Dom is still fairly new to diving, so it was a lot of fun seeing him get excited for things that I now take for granted… like groupers, blue spotted rays, and angel fish.

I also noticed something for the first time on this dive site, there are two tombstones! Now apparently their ashes were spread there, but these look a lot more like graves than the plaque at Chumphon.

It was a nice dive, but outside of the tombstones, there wasn’t much notable today.

Especially on our second dive…

Our second dive was to HTMS Suphairin/No Name, again. I think it’s my fourth time this week. And today’s visibility was absolutely terrible. We probably had 2m of visibility at some times, but throughout the dive it got progressively worse.

Also we had a bit of current too, but nothing super crazy.

The ship wreck was almost entirely cloaked by the fog so after 10 minutes, I decided to head to No Name so we could potentially see something.

I did spot a blue spotted sting ray and pointed it out to a couple dive instructors that I could tell were taking open water divers.

The dive site was absolutely FILLED with divers. Almost every time I circled the pinnacle I would get in a traffic jam with some of them.

We really didn’t see too much… the visibility didn’t help either….

With that, my morning of diving was over. So I went back to Taco Shack, helped clean gear, and then stayed at Taco for a bit hanging out with my friend Sina.

Also during this time, I received my certificate for finishing my Dive Master! A little late, but better than never. Now I have the privilege of carrying it around in my backpack as I continue my travels.

Eventually I went home to take a nap, before coming back to Taco for a final see you later to Sina.

It’s been a wonderful couple of months getting to hang out and know Sina. Her, Kit, and I will have a connection forever from going through this experience together.

She’s on her way back to Germany to start her masters degree and continue working at the company she’s been working remotely for. It was sad to see her go, but I’m happy she’s starting a new journey.

I then went home to strum on my guitar and then I received a message from DMT Tom asking if I wanted to play beach sand volleyball.

I played with these guys a long time ago, when I volunteered for Taco. Today they were just playing quads and Tom and I got on a team. We played a bunch of games and met some really nice people from Israel.

We played and played till the sunset and then it was time for dinner.

Tom really wanted to go to Duck 995, a restaurant I hadn’t been to in quite some time. It’s super touristy and because of that, there’s usually a line out the door. Today there wasn’t so we immediately sat down for a scrumptious meal.

Tom’s friend from the slow boat to Laos was randomly at the restaurant so he, Hugo, joined us.

Hugo was a really nice guy and it created some nice chats while we ate.

After dinner, we came back to Taco and Tom and I played a bunch of pool.

I called it an earlyish night because tomorrow I’ll be double boating! I’m just fun diving in the morning but in the afternoon I’ll have a refresher!

-Elie