Two very cool divers, which are now very good friends have cut together this awesome video about our diving together! I assisted on their Open Water, Advanced, Nitrox, Deep and Wreck Specialty courses during my Divemaster course at Sairee Cottage and it was a fantastic experience! Some of my first dive leads were these guys! Lucky I didn’t get lost. Thank you Tobbe and Linda. All credits for the video goes to Tobbe and Linda. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNVP_2xL3o
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Things We Do In Bangkok
24 hours in Bangkok to re-new Lionel’s new passport.
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An Unexpected Dive
For a while now I had been preparing for my 100th dive. It’s tradition to do this milestone dive naked. Butt naked. Naked and free. One instructor said she just went topless on her 100th, and I recently got an eyeful of our fellow DMT, Bobby’s naked dive when he jumped into the water full frontal, danglely bits and all, after I had just jumped in. You don’t have to do this, but I kinda wanted to. Especially because I had the appropriate buddy to do this dive with. So we had been waiting for my 100th dive. Waiting, because Lionel’s had this weird sinus problem lately where he bleeds…
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PADI Recreational Sidemount Course
Our dive school, Sairee Cottage Diving, is now offering the PADI Recreational Sidemount course, and we were lucky enough to be selected as “guinea pigs” for the first course! Diving with multiple tanks is something that has interested me for a while now and when I heard of this opportunity I was naturally very excited! The course is a three and a half day course, which is as long as our Open Water course and it is this long for a reason. Diving with a Sidemount configuration brings many benefits, such as twice the amount of air, added safety, longer dives and looking cool, however it also brings a range…
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Barotrauma
I’d heard the stories and how serious it can be if you dive on a cold, but never quite understood the extent of it all. We’ve both been quite sick for the last few days and went to the shop primarily to hand in our mapping and EAP projects. We did however end up signing up for the afternoon dives, where both Emma and I would lead one dive each. This is good practice for us in completing our Divemaster training. They also asked me to lead a customer the next day, so of course I signed up for that! I lead the first dive with Emma, a Divemaster and…
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Mapping A Dive Site
Lionel and I went to ‘map’ a dive site a few weeks ago. We were given a dive site called ‘Twins,’ so called because there is a shallow and a deep pinnacle, and it’s also bordered by two small islands connected by a sandbar!
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Deep Scenario – Divemaster Training
The weather was so poor when we did our Deep Specialty in December that we couldn’t actually get to the 40m depth. We did the two deep dives to 22m and 26m instead. Anything below 18m is considered a deep dive, so we were still able to get certified. Today, Neil took all of us DMTs on a 40m deep dive at Chumpon Pinnacles. This is an essential part of the PADI Divemaster Training. I was excited to finally experience this depth! It is pretty much the same as any other dive with a few considerations. We will be under 5 bars of pressure at 40m, meaning we will breathe…
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Studying Hard, or Hardly Studying…
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A Stressful Day
Today we were being assessed on our rescue skills as part of our Divemaster training. Stress levels were already elevated as rescue always brings some unexpected surprises with it. We triple checked all of our gear and each others gear to make sure we are ready for the rescue scenario we would face. Matt, our friend from university in Melbourne arrived on the island today to visit us, and just as we were wading into the water, he greeted us from the restaurant. He’ll get the front row seat to watch us struggle as we drag each other onto the beach. Once we hit the water, we were split into…
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The ‘She Can’t Swim’ Chronicles: 800 m Snorkel Test
After a nice dive the other day, we were told that we might as well do our 800 metre snorkel swim test, and our 15 minute treading water (2 minutes with hands and elbows out of the water). I was freaking out, as I wasn’t mentally or physically (would I ever be?) prepared.
