Day 243! Not too many pictures to show from today, but it was a nice and busy day nonetheless! I spent the morning and afternoon diving and had a nice evening hanging with my friend, Tom!

I woke up this morning nice and early for some diving! Today no one was on the schedule to fun dive, so I paid 300 baht for my two tanks and signed up on the pro list. It still feels pretty darn neat to do that.

Usually when you’re on the pro diver list, you join a group and just hang in the back. But the boat was fairly empty and there was one other pro diver, my instructor friend Tom (not to be mistaken with my DMT friend Tom).

Tom and I ended up diving together, so we didn’t need to join one of the groups on the boat. It ended up being a very nice morning of dives!

We started out our dives at HTMS Suphairin 313 and No Name… again. This was my 5th time at these dive sites this week. Regardless, I wanted to dive and this is where we were going.

Tom and I descended to the bottom of the shipwreck and stayed down there for quite some time. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to just fully focus on myself, my diving, and look at any and all details of things on the dive.

For this dive I looked at a lot of nudibranchs and just about every small hole on the shipwreck. There’s these tiny fish that take up residency and it’s really cute seeing them poke their heads out and scurry back into the holes when you get close. The ones I usually say hello to are in the barrels of the guns on the wrecks. I also spotted a puffer fish hiding, but didn’t get a picture of it.

We had a nice and long deep dive. I “guided” this one, in actuality I just kept track of where we were at. On the second dive Tom took the lead.

Our second dive was at Green Rock… again as well. I understand the instructors aren’t diving every morning, but as a dive master and fun diver, I wish they were try and spice it up more. But I do understand their itch to try and see the cool things we saw at this dive site the other day.

It was still a nice dive, I really enjoy Green Rock. We hit all the swim throughs and dove around the dive site. I spotted a moray eel and later on in the dive Tom spotted a couple of the biggest groupers I have ever seen… outside of that, it was a pretty okay dive.

My day of diving wasn’t over yet, as I had a refresher course to teach in the afternoon. So I got back to Taco Shack with just enough time to scarf down a chicken fried rice before heading back out.

My refresher today was Thalia! Her last dive was in November of last year, but she was super excited to get back into the water. Apparently, we were the first dive shop that made her do a refresher, but she was very happy to do one since this was her first dive without any friends or family.

Our first dive was at Mango Bay! We spent 10 minutes doing skills, she aced each one, and then we went on an over 50 minute fun dive along the wall of coral.

Our second dive was to Light House Pinnacle and it was some of the worst visibility I had seen in a while. Not only did we not find the turtle that lived there (apparently one of the instructors saw it literally go over our head), but we didn’t see anything else.

Luckily Thalia really enjoyed just floating through and breathing under the water… and we did plenty of that!

When I got back from the afternoon dives, my friend Tom (the DMT) wanted to go play more beach volleyball. So I immediately set out to the beach with him to meet up with the friends we made yesterday.

Tom and I played with two new people, Nico and Diego. Our first game wasn’t great… but once we got back on the court we found our synergy and won three in a row!

It was a blast, but really exhausting, especially after diving all day. I went back home, showered, and went to Taco Shack to enjoy dinner with Tom. My former manager, and manager of Taco Shack, Yi, had just come back from a week in Bangkok. So he joined us for dinner too and we caught up on the past week.

The rest of the night was spent playing many back and forth games of pool. We also met a few more new people at the hostel, which was really nice since a lot of my friends have left the island or are always busy.

I ended the night with a FaceTime with my parents! It was a lovely way to cap off a very nice day. Tomorrow I’ll be fun diving in the morning and then taking the rest of the day to hang out and relax!

I’m getting really close to 200 dives, it’ll be an accomplishing day when I do!

– Elie