Day 244! Time for another countdown! Today marks 8 days left on Koh Tao… for now. I’m sure I’ll be back in the future, probably sooner than I think! But I’m getting very excited for Australia and setting out on a new adventure. For now though, it’s time for some more fun diving as I journey to 200 total dives!

It’s been 10 days straight of diving so far and I have no intentions of stopping yet! I’m getting close to 200 dives and I want to hit that before I leave.

Why? … well why not!

Actually, I have heard that some dive shops in Australia look for DMT’s to have a certain amount of experience. 200 seems like a nice number to me and also would feel very accomplishing to have done 200 dives since May 31st when I started my open water.

Today I was tagging along on the pro divers list again. There unfortunately was no fun divers today… the island is a little quiet right now.

But my friend’s, and DMTs, Tom and Chris were on the boat diving together. So I dove with them as they practiced their navigation.

The boat only had one class on it, so we went to both of the shipwrecks this morning.

The first dive was to HTMS Sattakut, Chris was leading us and unfortunately for him… the visibility wasn’t helpful. It wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, but really was not great.

Luckily there was decent enough visibility around the wreck to see the seal faces puffer fish that lives on the ship.

I also spotted another pufferfish under one of the ship’s sentry guns. But a snapper was there to try and make sure I didn’t get close with my camera… maybe they were friends!

The rest of the dive was okay but I was super happy to have seen the seal faced puffer fish! It was only my third time seeing it and I had heard there was one around the shipwreck.

Our second dive was to HTMS Suphairin, this time Tom was leading us.

Again, there wasn’t much on this dive that stood out, but it was still a very enjoyable dive.

At one point on the dive, Dawid, the only instructor on the boat, snuck up on me and scared the heck out of me while I was zoned into the dive. He came out of nowhere and got in my face and made my whole body recoil. I gave him some crap afterwards about it but it was pretty funny how good he got me.

We wrapped up our dives and headed back to Taco Shack… and I was exhausted. For some reason I didn’t go to bed till on the later side the night before. And playing volleyball after double boating didn’t help either.

So I tried to go get a quick lunch by myself and take a nap. I wanted to get Mama Tam’s fried chicken, but it was closed for some reason. I continued down the road to Bingo and had a nice meal of chicken Laab and rice.

I then went home for a much needed nap. I passed out immediately when my head hit my pillow and woke up to the sound of my alarm going off. I immediately snoozed it for another 10 minutes and then texted my friend Chelsea to see what she was up to.

Chris and Tom were both diving in the afternoon, so I really only had Chelsea around to hang out with. Luckily, she had the game code names. So we took turns giving clues to each other and making the other person guess. Hopefully soon we will actually be able to play with some of our other friends.

We then went to Taco Shack to wait for the boat to come back. While we were waiting, my new friend Gali showed up to the hostel to sign up for diving! I was super excited to see that she decided to dive with us and that she also finally decided to sign up.

Now unfortunately, even though I encouraged her to sign up with our dive school… Taco doesn’t do commission for open water students. But I’m still glad she decided to dive with us.

The rest of the night I spent at Taco. I hung out with a fun group of instructors and DMTs. I also played a bunch of pool and hosted the trivia night! It’s been a while since I’ve had the time or opportunity to do so, and it was very fun!

For dinner, I had a chicken gra pao at Taco Shack… thankfully the DMTs help me get the discount (shhhh).

Tomorrow I’ll be taking out one fun diver in the morning! Since the waves are picking up, we’ll be going to a couple dive sites we rarely do in the morning… but you’ll see where they are tomorrow!

– Elie