Day 250! Wow… only two more days till l leave Koh Tao. Today was a really nice day and it unfortunately marked my last day of diving (for a bit). But I still enjoyed the rest of my day hanging out with friends and playing lots of pool.

I got to sleep in a bit this morning! I didn’t have a fun diver to take out today, but I did have a refresher in the afternoon.

So I woke up, hopped over to the minimart for some electrolytes and some donuts, and then headed over to Taco Shack to help prepare the bags for the afternoon.

No one else was there yet, so I started early and pretty prepared all the bags before one other instructor showed up.

My refresher today was Sol from Denmark! She did her open water in Italy one year ago and was getting back into diving so she could dive with her friend, who was just starting her open water.

The weather was perfect for our dives this afternoon. With all the rain and clouds recently, it was nice to have my last day of diving under the sun and blue sky.

Also what was very nice, we were back on the Taco Boat! I was pretty excited to be finishing out my time diving on the boat I started on!

I went over all of the skills we needed to do on the first dive and then we got geared up and jumped in.

It took use about 15 minutes to do all 8 skills. Air sharing took a few tries, but everything else went flawlessly. We set out on our fun dive down the wall of coral.

Pretty early on in the dive, I saw divers picking up track and I had a thought who it was. It was my friend Ash who is an ecologist at DPM dive shop. It was great running into her on my 200th dive!

My 200th dive?! How crazy is that.

We wrapped up our over hour dive and made our way to Lighthouse Pinnacle for our second dive.

After not seeing the turtle here last time, I was determined to find it! Especially since it was my last chance to dive with one… for now (lots of lasts today). Lucky for us, we jumped in and the turtle SURFACED a couple meters away from us. It hung out on the surface for a bit before plunging back down and we descended directly next to it.

We spent about 5 minutes with the turtle before moving on to dive around the rest of the dive site.

Outside of the turtle, we saw a medium sized barracuda hanging out by itself and what I thought was a giant parrot fish, but I’m not exactly sure what it was.

It was a great dive for dive 201 and I really enjoyed ending it on a refresher.

It’s been a wild ride of diving these past few months… but what’s even crazier is today was 100 days, to the day, that I started my open water course. I averaged 2.5 dives a day since May 31. Which is insane because I had days off in there. I’m so happy with my decision to do my DMT, thank you Kit for motivating me to do it.

I went home, showered, and then met up with Tom to play some pool and figure out dinner plans.

But before we could leave for dinner, I got a message that someone was interested in buying my fins! So I grabbed them, hopped on my bike, and drove to the pier.

I bought the fins (with boots) for 3500 baht, if I remember correctly. I sold the fins for 3500 baht. I got to use them essentially for free the last couple of months. I’ll hopefully be selling my boots to one of the instructors a rat ate through his and now his big toe sticks out of his boot.

I sold them to a DMT at crystal divers, so they’ll live on helping certify Dive Masters.

Tom and I met back up at Blue Chair. I was craving their massaman curry and Tom had never been there before.

For the rest of the night we played a ton, and I mean an absurd amount, of pool. Chris showed up for a bit too, so we rotated in and out depending on who lost and won.

I’m not sure how long we played, but it was a couple of hours… but it was a perfect way to cap off the night.

Right as I was about to leave, my refresher saw me and invited me to hang out with their group of travelers. They were playing some games so I joined them a for a little bit before heading to bed!

Tomorrow I’ll be taking the day to relax, pack up, and enjoy my last day in the island. We’ll see what I get up to without diving!

-E lie