Diving is awesome! Over the last 8 days Cat and I have both completed the Open Water and Advance Open Water courses. The Open Water course was good and taught you all the basics which allows you to dive to a max depth of 18m but the Advanced is where all the fun happens.
To do the advanced we had to complete five different types of dives. The first dive was a deep dive which took us down to 30m. Being 30m underwater is sooooo much fun. Now due to refraction the deeper you go underwater the less colour is visible. So when we got to the bottom our instructor pricked her finger on a sea urchin and it bled bright green! Was really cool to see, she then also brought out a piece of fruit which we had to try and guess what it was, I managed to get it but most other people thought it was a plum when it was actually a tomato. So you can probably guess red is the first colour that get stripped underwater. She also brought an egg down which when she cracked open due to the pressure and can play tennis with the yoke! Also the longer and deeper you go underwater the more nitrogen your body intakes so we had to do tests for nitrogen narcosis, this was just simple stuff like our instructor held up a certain amount of fingers and then we had to hold up our fingers to total 11, easy right…..well 30m under it’s not so but again I managed this without to much difficulty.
Other dives we did were navigation, using a compass and natural reference points, my compass skills weren’t the greatest but who wants to look at a compass when you have loads of fish to look at. We then did our photography dive which was the most fun, again this was down to 30m and it was also our second dive without an instructor which is loads better as you get to explore whatever you want. Following this we did a naturalist dive which involved fish and coral identification and again we were able to take the camera down. Though I’ve only put 50 photo’s up we did take just over 200 but I think there’s only so many under water photo’s of fish you can look at…..So some of the fish we saw were: barracuda, Angel Fish, Clown Fish, we found Nemo, Sting Ray, Trigger fish which after I chased to get a photo’s of found out that they are the most aggressive fish in Koh Tao and can easily take a chunk of your leg, an adult Harlequin Sweet Lips (v rare), Puffer fish, Cushion Star fish, Big Crab, Blue/Yellow Angel fish which again are quite rare and many more.
Our final dive last night was a night dive which was probably joint favorite with the photography which was the night dive. Just like on land the sea has its nocturnal creatures which are mainly predators so it’s much more exciting. Some Scottish lad fell on my head at the beginning causing me to land on a sea urchin which aren’t the most pleasant of creatures to and on! We turned off our torches and played with the bio luminescent plankton which lights up with you make a movement in the water, again very cool. The only disappointing aspects was that we didn’t see any Bull or Whale sharks but hey Oz is where the proper dangerous creatures are, can’t wait!
Tonight we’re off to Koh Phi Phi and only have ten days to go until Oz, how time flies when you’re having fun!
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