Certifiable

As I sit and type this post, I look to the left, and other than rIAm at the computer next to me, I see the dive shop. Straight ahead I see the open-air restaurant run by Ban’s Diving Resort, where we are staying. And to the right I see the sun beginning its nightly plunge into the beautiful blue water that is the Gulf of Thailand. The temperature has fallen for the evening to a cool and comfy 28C or so, with a gentle breeze and no humidity, it’s just about perfect. Although I thought it was perfect earlier, with the sun shining bright from high in the sky, warming us to 34 or 35 — but again, with no humidity, and having just come out of the water, it was perfect.

I have now become a certified Advanced Open Water Diver, which basically means I can do any recreational scuba diving (without advanced I could only go to 18m and would not have training in various useful specialties like deep, multi-level, navigation and night diving). I can also add, diving is awesome! Of course, that’s no surprise. Today we went down to 30 meters and saw the biggest grouper you could imagine, as well as an ENORMOUS school of barracuda (hundreds–seemed like thousands), which started to kind of circle around and below us before eventually swimming away. It was beautiful, and so amazing!! Tomorrow (Friday) I will do two more fun dives, as so far all of my dives have been part of my courses. They’ve been great dives, but I look forward to not having to worry about anything but looking and beautiful fish, corals and other sea life. It’s also been cool being able to be a diving buddy team with rIAm, which makes yet another way we have shared our lives, and a pretty awesome one at that. Tomorrow, though, rIAm will rest while I dive (she’s had a bit of a nagging cold that has slowed her diving a little bit), and then we are going to take a night boat from Koh Tao back to the mainland.

But before we leave, some of my thoughts from underwater…
> As I was doing my descent on Dive 1, I looked down and realized that we were going through a school of fish. Totally harmless, but totally amazing at the same time. I think I was hooked for life at that moment.
> As a scuba diver, it is exhilirating to be able to swim with the fishes. Even the “ordinary” ones are awesome to watch.
> Seeing a giant sea turtle swimming around at 12 meters depth or so on Dive 1 sealed the deal that I am going to keep on diving.
> On Dive 6 my buddy and I navigated on our own, around a dive site (where we saw a blue spotted stingray and sea snake, among many many fish and coral) and back to the boat… leading rIAm and a divemaster with us, giving us hard evidence of our perfect navigation. This was definitely a highlight of diving so far, because it was a great dive capped by great success at navigation.
> “Flying” through the water is one of the best feelings, as is the sense of weightlessness that comes along with being in the water.
> Being around the barracuda was one of the awe-inspiring moments of my life, although it came to me slowly. We came around the edge of a pinnacle and I could see two huge school of fish, one bigger than the other. We swam around the bigger one, a bit above, and as we came around I realized that all the fish were long and pointy–they were barracuda! Then our instructor had us all stop and “stand” there a moment, and the barracuda started circling around, and the enormity of the school and beauty of the fish and the way they were swimming hit me. I felt like I could have watched for hours, but the barracuda had other plans.
> After swimming a bit further we cam across the enormous grouper, the grouper to dwarf all other groupers I’ve ever seen or considered seeing. Suddenly the “big” black grouper I’ve pulled out of the Gulf of Mexico look like guppies.
> I can’t wait to do more diving; I’m definitely hooked!
> Oh yeah, and as somebody who has lived in a non-metric country his whole life, I have to keep reminding myself that my 30 meter dive was to 100 feet!

As you can tell, we have been thoroughly enjoying our time here. The laid back life, sun-soaked sand and water, good food and people have drawn us in and make it hard to leave. But at the same time, we are very excited about our next several weeks (more on that next). Also, the room rate at least doubles when I am not enrolled in a course, so it’s a good time to take off! We both are a bit more tanned and not as white, but we still don’t look like we’ve been here too long… guess that’s how it goes when you come from Toronto and Chicago!

So our next several weeks. We’ve had a minor change in plan. Basically, we want to do more diving, and it isn’t hard to do that diving in some of the very best dive sites in the whole world. They are located in the Adaman Sea, off the west coast of Thailand, and we found a reasonably-priced all-inclusive liveaboard dive trip that will visit them. So after we leave here, we will go to Phuket, spend a couple days, and then board a boat for a 4 day/4 night dive trip that will go to the Similan Islands, as well as some other awesome spots for diving. Even my instructor said the best diving he’s ever done is in the Similan Islands. We are very excited! After the dive trip we will head to Bangkok for a day and then over to the organic farm for our first volunteer project. It will be a bit strange perhaps, to go so directly from underwater to tilling land, but we’re excited.

We are also hoping to find a good place in Phuket to watch the SUPER BOWL, even though it will come on at 6:30am or so (Super Sunday is Super Early Monday Morning for us!). I have been telling rIAm for a while now that we would leave Chicago and then the Bears would go all the way. But no regrets, we’d both rather spend our time and money diving and traveling than getting Super Bowl tickets. Plus, how cool would it be to watch the game in a Thai bar with a bunch of farang (foreingers)?

Lastly, as you may have noticed, we’ve been too busy being beach bums and divers to upload more photos or do any posts (until now) from Koh Tao. We should have internet in Phuket, so we may do some updating there. Internet is doubtful on our dive trip, and we don’t know exactly what the situation on the farm will be. But we’ve got lots of great photos to post and stories to share.