Into the open water
Trip Start
Jan 29, 2008
1
15
32
Trip End
Mar 04, 2008
Ko Tao,
Thailand
Friday, February 15, 2008
We started with breakfast at Choppers. We ate there a couple days ago and I had french toast which was pretty much the best french toast ever, so Cindy wanted to try it and I wanted to have more. They also have cranberry juice there, which I haven't seen anywhere else in Thailand so it is quite a treat. The other day I had three glasses. Today I managed to restrain myself and only drank one glass. Probably because I was still doing last minute reading and we didn't have much time for chillaxing. It did occur to me though that the cranberry juice would probably be available in every bar so I am going to have to start asking for it everywhere, since every place here seems to have a bar.
Breakfast at Choppers
After breakfast we went to the dive shop. We reviewed a few things, like dive tables, with our fabulous teacher SH before taking our quiz. Then we got our equipment ready for our dive and had a break. During the break SH showed us these bungalows on the Sairee Beach he thought we were staying at, Sunset Buri Resort, and once we saw them we thought we should be staying there so we tried to score two bungalows but they were full, and they didn't take reservations. They told us to come in at 10:00am tomorrow and see if any rooms open up. It's first come first serve, so you have to be there at checkout to grab a room. Of course we can't do that since we'll be on a dive at the time, so we went back to the dive shop to see if they could help us out. They are fabulous and are going to try to help us out by sending someone there at 10 tomorrow morning with our bags.
After our break we met up at the dive shop again and walked down to the beach. We got on a longtail boat taxi with about 20 people and a ton of equipment. The taxi took us to the dive boat. It didn't take too long to get to our dive site at Mango Bay. We somehow ended up being the last people to dive (out of 20!) because we had to wait around for 2 air tanks to be filled. Finally our tanks were ready and we went in the water.
Hippo
Once our tanks were ready we still had to wait because these chicken shit girls were holding up the show. One of them was refusing to jump in with the rest of her group. So we had to wait for that to get sorted out and the crowd to keep it moving so we could dive in.
At first Robert and I had to do more skills. Cindy was with us so she just snorkeled around for a bit while we did them. Then she came down with us to practice a few things. Once that was out of the way, we just had some fun. It was a very shallow dive, only seven metres deep. We didn't see much and I found it hard to stay down in such shallow water. SH had to give me two of his weights to keep me down there.
After about 35 minutes we resurfaced and returned to the boat. Everyone else came in shortly after, and then we moved on to our next location, Twins. This was much better because: we got to go a little deeper (15m), there was a lot more to see, we didn't have to wait around, and we didn't have to do any skills.
We were down for about 35 minutes again. Robert really sucks back that air! I saw a fish about the length of me, which was pretty cool, and some other cool sea life down there. It was pretty fun. But by the time we resurfaced it was getting quite late and was almost dusk. We kept joking about how it was going to be a night dive since our first dive started so late, but we made it in before the sun went down so that was good.
After we got back to the dive shop we had some dinner with our instructor at a place he recommended with excellent ribs - the Hippo - and now I am just studying for my exam tomorrow. We get to do two more fun dives tomorrow, one at 18m, so that is going to be pretty cool. We start really early though as we're doing a morning dive and I need to catch up on some sleep.
