Diving!

Gonna be slow to type, Denny, Nate and I are talking to our dive leader, Connor.

Woke up this morning naturally, about 8:30 or so. Came down to breakfast about 8:50, sat with Mike, Matt and Caitlin (Becky was skyping her boy, or attempting to anyway), had a banana pancake (really a crepe) and a water. Tasty, though service took forever as usual. Koh Tao's so beautiful, no one does their job very quickly, we figure. I spent almost two hours wrestling with various wireless networks, dropped off some laundry for 80 baht, and after my 3rd or so attempt I finally got in, once Mike told me the password for the one place was all caps. That helped a lot. I also had a headache and my nose was stuffed up, so kind of a frustrating morning. Got some food around 11:30, pad thai with chicken, barely finished it in time to make it to our meeting at noon (we actually got the food around 11:45). Got suited up, everything together, went out in a little boat to a bigger boat, got on that and sat up top. There we met our dive leader, Connor, Irish guy. Cool guy, very animated, little twitchy in a way – always moving some part of his body. Nice guy. We went out to the first dive site, Chumphon Pinnacle, known for sharks. My ears hate diving, especially my left ear, but Connor showed me a way to rub behind the ear that helped. We went down, saw some fish (I didn't see a whole lot, still fiddling with my ears), but I did see at least FOUR bull sharks. At a distance obviously, but still. Amazing. I did see some fish – I'd be looking down to keep track of the group, and then I'd look left and realize I was missing hundreds and hundreds of fish. It was beautiful. We had a hard time seeing coral, too high and not quite enough visibility, but obviously far better than Nelson's. A lot warmer, too. Came back up, reverse block unsurprisingly. Still, amazing to see the sharks. Brenna had to come up a little early because her fins were no good for the current, but that's life. Got up (with a little trouble getting my fins off), chilled, heard a briefing about triggerfish: aggressive, it's near mating season, apparently they like to come at people. You let them chew on your fins and then kick them, apparently. Connor said sometimes they go out themselves to the triggerfish nests and purposely kick them around just for fun. Then we dove again, the current pushed us around, I had a lot of trouble getting back to the group but got there eventually, had some issues clearing my air spaces – same old, but still, worth it. Saw AMAZING fish here, so much coral, so many fish, some clams, beautiful stuff. We went through a swimthrough – I managed to cut my hand on coral, sadly. My tank banged against the top of the tunnel, but fortunately nothing was living there. It was cool, but definitely scary at the time: I had so much trouble getting my buoyancy low enough to get through. Overall, though, my buoyancy was much better the second time around, 5.6 kilos is apparently a good number. Came up, saw some amazing walls of coral, great stuff. Came back up, got on the boat, chilled, looked at a fish card and got some things down, and came back here. We washed our stuff off, got stamped, and talked to Connor for a bit. He told us about other stuff nearby, how fishing boats were going to destroy Koh Tao's diving, some sites back in Ireland, how the Thai own places that the Bhutanese work at here on Koh Tao, and then Denny and John talked for a while about environmental work for the state, college administration, school administration, all good. Denny's heading up to change money and then tonight we are DEFINITELY partying. Apparently it's Australian Day and all the dive instructors wanted us to join them at Chopper's.

Tuesday, January 26th, roughly 5:30-6 PM local time