Valentine’s Day! Instead of spending the day on long, romantic walks on the beach, Todd and I went scuba diving! We were picked up early in the morning at our hotel, and spent about 45 minutes in a van driving to a dock somewhere south of Patong beach. The boat we were diving from had about 50 people onboard, and after we left the dock we were paired up with our instructor, Bjorn. We chatted with him for a bit; he is a submarine engineer from Norway when he isn’t enjoying the diving lifestyle in Thailand. After some small talk we started studying our copies of the PADI Introduction to Scuba instruction book. Since neither Todd nor I are certified divers we had to review the basics, then write a short test to demonstrate our knowledge of the material. We easily passed the test, then relaxed as the boat continued sailing to our first dive site at Racha Noi, named Banana Bay. The trip to the first dive site took about 1.5 hours, in total, though with the conversation and the studying it went fairly quickly. Luckily neither Todd nor I felt any sort of seasickness on the trip.
After arriving at the dive site the boat dropped anchor, we suited up and jumped in. We quickly descended to the ocean floor, were we began to show Bjorn that we remembered some of the basic skills from the Intro to Scuba book. I got through the underwater test pretty quickly; the skills I learned during my dives in Jamaica came back as soon as I put the gear on. It took Todd a few attempts to demonstrate the recovery of the mouthpiece, but he picked it up quickly. Once we demonstrated we weren’t going to have issues while underwater, we began exploring the ocean. The first dive ended up lasting 43 minutes underwater. We saw a variety of fish, some coral, and overall had a good first dive. When the air in our tanks approached the warning level we surfaced and got back into the boat. It was busy with everyone coming up at the same time, but it did not take long to get out of our gear. We then ate lunch while the boat took us to our second dive site on Racha Noi. The food on the boat was great; I ate all of the options, including a nice massaman curry, some fried chicken, some steamed vegetables, and some peanut/chicken noodles.
Our second dive was a lot more fun than the first; after descending to the bottom we swam around a rock outcropping which was protruding from the island to finish the dive at a different point from the start. The boat picked us up from where we surfaced. We saw a couple of neat fish during this dive, including several puffer fish, lion fish, and a variety of other generic tropical fish.
Our third dive took place at Racha Yoi, a smaller island about 45 minutes back towards the mainland from Racha Noi. Here there was a sunken ship which some of the divers got to go down to; due to it being an intro scuba lesson we couldn’t descend below 12 metres, so we were only able to look at the ship from above. There were a variety of sunken cube frames, though, which we got to swim through. The Thailand marine authority sunk them to form an artificial reef, and there were already some sea urchins occupying the spaces between the cubes. We also got to see an octopus hidden in a rock, which was pretty exciting.
The trip back to land was uneventful; we got our certificate of completion, and purchased the photos Bjorn had been taking (the above photos were all taken by him). It turns out this is how the divers make their money, they take photos and charge their clients to get them. I don’t have any complaints about it; he had quite the nice camera, and tuned it well, so the photos turned out nicely. Better than any photos I’d have taken anyways!