PADI, diving and Instructor Development (IDC)

The first days diving we tackled the Multilevel and DUP specialties around Koh Tao which saw some good diving conditions! Interesting to see was that the coral bleaching was slowing down and actually seems to be on the mend.

The second day saw us arrive at Chaweng Beach for some Underwater Navigation and Search & Recovery action. This day turned into a fantastic days diving. Starting out near the beach the visibility was around 50 centimetres and we lost each other within moments. After surfacing we were less than two meters apart from each other and we decided to try again a few 100 meters further away from the beach. Viz improved to 3 meters and we completed the Nav and first Search & Recovery dive. You can't ask for better conditions for these kind of specialties, can you?

During the second Search and Recovery dive we found cazillion of original copy sunglasses, half a dozen of old dive masks, a wallet from an Aussie with drivers license (see picture above), money was gone, a waterproof Pentax camera in the water for 3 weeks, full battery and full functionality, a fishing rod in great shape, shoes, bottles, hats in all varieties and lots of plastic. There are still two beach chairs out there! An excellent day diving at the beach! One of the best dives for finding goodies out of many I've done there. Visibility also went up to 5 meters, almost heaven for us at that moment!

The third day of diving took us to Sail Rock for the Deep dive specialty. This picture shows Mark at around 26 meters, pondering about the physics of diving and wondering what ever happened to his bottle of water.

Visibility was great here and we enjoyed up to 2- to 25 meters viz. Wonderful diving once more.

One of the exciting things I saw during the 2nd dive at Sail Rock was this Conus Textile or textile cone shell, a poisonous species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Conidae, the cone snails, cone shells or cones. Luckily for me I spotted it's squatter before I got anywhere close and the hermit crab inside, visible at the lower right of the shell with it's yellow feet and feelers made it harmless but still a very interesting and unusual sight.