Out Of The Blue

It has been a while since my last post and boy have things changed.  I have spent the better part of the last week under the sea, among the corals, in the day and at night, becoming a PADI certified “Advanced Open Water” diver.

Koh Tao has been amazing and the dive sites were beautiful.  There are honesty not enough good things I can say about my time and my experiences both in the water and getting to know my fellow dive group and the great instructors at Ban’s Diving Resort.  I will be back when the money and free time line-up like they have for this amazing journey I have been on, that I am sure of.

Now for why I ended up here and how I fell in love with diving.  It all happened suddenly over breakfast in Kuala Lumpur.  I was sitting with two sisters, eating about 20 pieces of toast, and we started talking about our trips and our desires to go northward to Thailand and try to catch the full-moon party on Koh Phangan and see if it was as wild as they say.  So right then-and-there we booked a cheap flight, a hostel on Koh Samui right next to the ferry pier in-case the party was too wild for our liking, and started to research where to go diving once we went to Koh Tao.

The full-moon party wasn’t as wild and crazy as they said, yeah some people got stabbed, a lot of people were drunk, and plenty had smoked some pot or had a shroom shake, but that is to be expected of any large-scale festival.  We simply sat on the beach, drank our buckets and watched the tank-top clad beach boys try their best to woo drunken sirens who just wanted to dance and get more drunk.

But there’s always a silver-lining, at our hostel on Samui, quite a few people had just come from Koh Tao and really talked up how good of an experience they had at Ban’s.  That was all we needed and we were booked at Ban’s, with free accommodations for divers, by that evening.

A short ferry ride later and we set foot on the beautiful Koh Tao.  Koh Tao is the type of paradise that you don’t realize was amazing until you leave and are faced with the real world once again and yearn to be back on that peaceful little island, surrounded by friends, fish, and fellow divers.  Everything started great as well once we arrived at the resort, I’m always happy with a free upgrade to an air-con room.

We started our Open Water Diver course that evening with a video, paperwork, and introductions to our instructors and dive master, the amazing Jens, Stefan, and Nook.  The Open Water course was a lot of dive theory and inappropriate jokes and was great.  With the exception of a few people getting ill or asthma claiming one, the group stayed pretty much intact and was a great group that fed off each other’s bad jokes.

It was all done in a flash and 4 dives later, we were all certified Open Water Divers and celebrating our successful course with lots of drinks.  I loved diving so much I signed myself up for the Advanced Open Water Diver course.  I was the only one from our group moving on to the next phase so I couldn’t drink too much before the next course in the morning, an intensive 5 dives over a day and a half.  So I only drank two and a half hong thong buckets. 🙂

Now for the AOW.  The advanced course was amazing, Anthony, Lee, and Ploy were amazing leaders and teachers and were even more inappropriate with their jokes than I thought was possible.  The first dive was down to about 32m at the Chumphon Pinnacle.  It was great to go deep and experience how quickly you use up air at that depth.  The next dive was a Navigation dive, where we were taught how to properly use our dive computers and compasses and set off in teams of 2 to get a sense for navigating around a reef.  Our instructor, who told us later when we were on the surface, forgot that this was the advanced course and was treating it like a fun dive, just diving around the reef with us because we were diving so well.

There are no words to describe properly how amazing the third dive of the first day was.  It was the night dive that probably made me utterly smitten with diving.  Picture spending the entire day out on the boat, already having dived twice, driving out a beautiful section of coral and jumping in right before sunset so that as it slowly gets darker, your eyes adjust and can see the outline of the reef without the torch and dive in the darkness.  After a close encounter with a triggerfish in the dark, we broke off from where the other divers were going, spotted a pufferfish and a lot of fish attacking the small fish that our lights illuminated, we descended to about 15m underneath a coral shelf.  And while we were alone and out of sight of any other divers or torches, the signal for torches off was given.  We stood on the bottom, in total darkness.  And then the first hand moved… and we were engulfed in a flash of blue.  And then another movement, and another flash.  We had managed to find the perfect spot where a massive amount of bioluminescent plankton were idling about, and with every move we were surrounded by an unimaginable amount of tiny blue fireflies.  We left our torches off and swam through the darkness, with the beads of neon blue rolling off and around each diver.  It was a sight so beautiful and amazing words hardly do the experience justice.

After our surreal experience, we had two more dives to do the following morning.  Both of which were our first real practical tests to see if we could navigate by ourselves without any instructors around.  Needless to say my buddy team was on point and we did great on both dives navigating through and a round the reefs without an instructor present.

But with all great things, the fun must come to an end when you only have limited time to get back to the other side of the world.  Begrudgingly on a beautiful day we boarded a ferry and left Koh Tao.  Soon after, an emergency stop had to be made in Chumphon because one of my travel mates got sick.  Two days later and now we are back on the road in a packed minibus and on our way to Kanchanaburi and to finally see some Thai jungle.

 

 above is a short video of the deep dive and snorkeling in the rain.