Day 247! 5 more days left and I just hit 195 dives. It’s a very doable goal to have set to hit 200 dives and I’m almost there! Today was a nice day of double boating. I had a fun morning of fun dives and then a nice afternoon dealing with a refresher.

I didn’t have any fun divers again today, but I still wanted to get some fun dives in. So I hopped on the pro list and tagged along with the only dive group on the boat.

We were coming out of Hin Wang pier today, since the waves are still bad on the west side. But you need a taxi boat to get to your boat. Our old Cappy has started taking us on his long tail boat. But he didn’t wake up to help. So we waited and waited until eventually the dive school Bans gave us a ride out to our boat.

Ste was wrapping up one of his open water courses and we were heading to Leam Thian Bay (the other side of the caves). My friend Gali was on this dive, so we got to dive with each other which was fun! Her and I met the other day at volleyball and I helped her decide what dive school to chose.

The first dive was a beautiful 43 minutes. Ste spotted a couple moray eels and I spotted a blue spotted stingray, two parrot fish kissing repeatedly, and a unicorn fish attack a trigger fish (this one was bizarre). We also saw two remora dancing around on one of the open water students… but outside of that, it was just nice to enjoy diving. We also had some crazy visibility, which made the dive more fun.

Our second dive was to Aow Mao. We didn’t see the shipwreck or the cube world since we were diving with open water divers. But it was still a beautiful dive.

It was raining on and off the entire morning and sometimes the sun would come out… but mainly it hid and rained for most of the morning.

We got back to Taco and I was immediately spun around, right back out into our afternoon dives. I ate my lunch on the taxi, since there was room, and we sped off for a fun afternoon refresher course.

My refresher today was Liam, from Israel. It had been since 2016 since he had dove last. He was really nice and super excited to get the gear on and back in the water.

We smashed through the skills in around 10 minutes. Then we went on a fun dive for almost 40 minutes, it would’ve been longer but he started floating up at the end of our dive and he couldn’t figure out how to get back down, even with me explaining it. So I just met him at the surface and we finished our dive.

Our second dive was at Tanote and it was pretty incredible one. The schools of fish are big now and spread the entire north side of the dive site. This actually made me a bit disoriented and turned around. But it was fun nonetheless.

Liam was already planning on doing his advanced, which I’m sure he’ll smash. But for me, that was the end of my day of diving.

I went home and showered quick, before coming back to Taco for pool and food.

I started my night of eating, with a chicken quesadilla… and when I say night of eating, I was insanely hungry for some reason

I’ve never felt hungry after a quesadilla at Taco Shack… but today something was different. I was really hungry still. So I ordered a chicken gra pow and ate the entire plate too.

Yi paid for my chicken gra pao in exchange for me helping him set up the smash ball game that was meant to be playing tonight.

This was easily one of the biggest games of smash ball I’ve hosted at taco shack.

After the tournament was over, most people liked the game so much they wanted to play more.

Before I called it a night, Yi had food he wanted to share with me. One of our instructor friends caught a trigger fish the other day. So I tasted fish for the first time in quite some time. This meat of the fish almost tasted like chicken.

But after that, it was time for bed.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be taking out fun divers as I quickly approach leaving the island and hitting 200 dives. Looking forward to a fun morning!