Days 247 – 248: Koh Tao
Koh Tao is one of the top diving destinations in Thailand – not just because of the variety of reefs near the island and abundant sea life (apparently whale sharks had been spotted in the area within the last week!), but also because it’s a great place to learn – there are tons of beginner-friendly and advanced challenges to cut your diving teeth on. Back in June, we were disappointed when our lack of advanced certification made us miss out on diving with eagle rays in Indonesia, so we decided to take the opportunity to get our credentials for deep diving before we headed to South America, where hopefully we’ll have a chance to explore the Galapagos!
Koh Tao has a 10-month high season without over 300 days of sunshine per year. Unfortunately for us, Oct/Nov is their rainy season so the water was choppy and visibility was utter crap. But we walked away with our SSI Advanced Adventure (equivalent to PADI AOW), so time well spent. When we weren’t in the water, we were lounging around in our awesome honeymoon suite!
We spend the next 2 days completing an SSI Advanced Adventurer course with Roctopus Dive – Snowy, one of the dive-shop dogs – greets us when we show up in the morning
After a briefing with our dive master we jump on the boat and head out into the choppy surf
Our forth dive site is a wreck: the HTMS Sattakut – a former US Navy ship that was sold to the Thais, and then purposefully sunk after it was decommissioned in 2011. At 30m, this is the deepest dive we’ve been on yet!
Sadly, we have pretty poor visibility during our wreck dive
Wreck diving in Koh Tao
We swim around and search of sealife, but don’t see much today except for a few small fish and some Christmas-tree worms
We clock in 30min @ 30m, then ascend to the surface (dutifully making our 3min safety stop at 5m, of course)
After our night-dive that evening, we are certified advanced divers!
Between our morning dives and our night dive, we have the afternoon free, so we enjoy some homemade tuna salad by the pool (did…did I mention it’s our own private pool?)