I’m baaaack! I know it’s been radio silence for a long time on this travel blog, but that’s because Lionel and I haven’t been traveling. We’ve been settled on Koh Tao now for a while. This month was actually our 5 year anniversary of starting our PADI Open Water scuba diving course. In December this year, it’ll be our 5 years of actually living and working on Koh Tao as dive professionals! Crazy how fast the time has gone. I’ve slithered back out of the water that is now my home to talk about something that has radically changed my life recently. The thing that I believe is an essential…
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This Is What We Do – A Diving Video
Here’s an underwater video I shot for Sairee Cottage. Lionel is side-mount diving with a colleague. Side-mount diving is diving with two tanks either side. That’s double the air, and potentially double the dive time. You look cooler (very important in diving), and you can squeeze into some pretty cool crevices!
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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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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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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: Assisting on an Open Water course
We got a call the night before and were told that as we now have 40 dives (whoo!!), we were to start assisting on two Open Water courses the following morning. Assisting on a course may involve logistics such as packing the students’ dive bags to running the boat briefing, watching students underwater
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Dive Gear Packages: More Christmas Presents to Myself!
Treat yo’self to a dive gear packages! For Christmas this year, apart from paying for my PADI Dive Master training, I got myself some new scuba diving equipment. Because why not? My Aqualung rashie, perfect for the warm waters of Thailand. My Aqualung Shot FX fins. They come in purple and white, but I love the grey and white. These fins are designed for females so they’re a bit shorter (easier to fin in), and have a slightly smaller foot pocket. I find every other fin, the pocket is too wide so my foot slides around in it. My Aqualung Ego booties. Super soft neoprene that goes up the ankle.…
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Diving to join the under water world in Koh Tao
Our main reason for coming to Koh Tao was to do some diving. I’ve wanted to learn how to dive for a while now. After our epic journey to Koh Tao, we were tired and a bit discouraged. However, after speaking to Robin at Sairee Cottage Diving, we signed up to start the course that night with some theory and 3 chapters of homework! The next morning we began our classroom theory with Robin and then got taught on the equipment by Neil. After lunch we jumped into the water with our gear at Mango Bay to do our confined dive with all our mask and emergency skills. We had…
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My Fear of Water, and then I went Diving
I’d been apprehensive about diving ever since we had planned this trip. I knew it would be cost effective to take a course in South East Asia, but there was but one problem. I can’t swim. For months I’ve been trying to work out whether I could dive, whether I would drown, or whether I would even enjoy it (I’m certainly not a dare devil). And after hearing from others that you need to take a ‘SWIM TEST’ before you could dive, I had been dreading it. But considering we’re on this once in a lifetime adventure, and my main ambition traveling was to try new things and challenge myself,…
