Koh Tao Part III

The previous days may have been all about fun and working towards getting our first tast of diving but after the high of our first dive came the crashing reality of our PADI exam!  Well when I say exam I should say multiple choice quiz but with that out of the way and all of us passing easily we were all back to the pier anxiously awaiting another Buddah dive boat to take us out to another dive site, Mango Bay 🙂  Unfortunately there were no mangos there but we did have another excellent dive which included a few more practical exercises for our diving certificate and a bit of a look around trying to identify fish the best of which was the Trigger fish, a pretty cool looking fish but one that you have to be a bit wary of as they can be a bit aggressive!! 😮 

With our exam out of the way it meant that the next day was dedicated to diving so after an early (well early for us …. come on we’re on holiday!!) we headed off on the back of a truck to the pier and our final PADI test, a dive to 18m which was going to take place at a dive site known as the South West Pinnacle.  Unfortunately the dive didn’t start too well for me, for some reason during my descent I wasn’t able to equalise the pressure in my ears so kept on having to stop, try and equalise the pressure and a couple of times return a metre of so up the anchor line we were travelling down, needless to say that everyone else continued down to our diving depth.  Thankfully though with the help of my dive instructor I managed to sort everything out, equalise the pressure in my ears and join everyone else all the way down at 18m!  It is funny, when someone says to you that you will be diving at 18m it doesn’t sound that big but when you are down there or even when you try and visualize how deep that actually is it all of a sudden seems a lot bigger than you first thought! 🙂  To give you an idea of what we saw down there here are a few pictures …. not ones that I have taken but pictures of what we saw none the less.  (Guess the fish time mum and dad!!)

So by the time we all returned to the surface we were all newly accredited SCUBA divers, WOOHOO, which meant that the dive that afternoon was for fun and that started before we had even entered the water.  Up until now we had always done the same sort of entry into the water where we stepped off from the side of the boat into the water but for this afternoon’s session we had a second option available to us if we wanted to take it ….. the Bond entry!! 😀  The Bond entry is best described as walking up to the edge of the boat and then performing a forwards sommersault into the water.  In the end all apart from one of the group accepted the challenge and all to various degrees of success but perhaps the best adaptation of the dive was by Kadri who had listened to the instructions intently and followed them to a T, lean forward and the weight of the air tanks will push you over into a roll …. it didn’t!!  Instead Kadri performed a particularly well executed forward flop.  Once we were all in the water we descended down to the sea floor and just had some fun muking around with one another, we even ended up having a horse race!  All in all a pretty good end to our course which that evening we topped off with a celebratory meal along with a few drinks. 🙂