Team Open Water

Ko Tao is an island of about 5000 that caters to divers. We headed to the Buddha View Resort where I was to take the 4 day Open Water dive course and Michael was taking the 2 day Advanced Open Water course. After collapsing for a few hours I went and got my text book, had my lunch, and had my first class that afternoon. My group was very multicultural - Georgie from England, Peter from Australia, Sean from Canada, and Gustav from Sweden. The girls were allowed to pick from the boys our dive partners for the course. I choose Sean, my fellow North American, an 18 year old from Vancouver who was traveling for eight months. We watched about 90 minutes of video giving us the basics of diving and then we had 125 pages of homework for the next morning. Ugh, homework - I was not happy. Luckily Michael had homework too so we sat on our porch overlooking the sea reading our chapters.





After another morning in the class room which included 2 quizzes we finally got hands on in the afternoon in the pool. We were fortunate to have a great instructor, Jesper, and two dive instructors in training, Dani and Ricky. After learning some of the important skills like breathing, clearing your regulator, seeing how much air you have, etc. we moved on to equally if not more important things such as breakdancing underwater, having underwater races, and running up the side of the wall and doing backflips. Jesper had a little write on/write off board that he used to ask questions such as, "Does Ricky have a cute butt?," "Is your buddy sexy?," and "Does size matter?" which he would then pass around so we could all record our answers. I think he was trying to distract us from the fact that we were breathing into this funny contraption and his strategy must have worked because nobody freaked out and everyone showed up for day two.

Day two consisted of practicing our skills in the ocean - yikes. To get your certification you have to show that you can do a series of basic skills - for example maintaining neutral buoyancy, following a compass, and my least favorite - clearing your mask. This one we had to do every dive - five times in all. What's amazing is that by the end of your second day you're diving to 18 feet in the ocean. It was incredibly cool and I think the feeling of your first dive is probably something you don't ever forget.

The next two days were basically doing dives - two a day. At this point we were all putting our own equipment together, running skills with Jesper, and seeing many different dive sites. On the third day we dove to 36 feet and on the forth we went to 54 feet. As we became more advanced and comfortable with our skills Jesper ran through other important skills such as blowing water rings, underwater kissing (yes, kissing an eighteen year old), and the James Bond entry.





The James Bond entry is when you do a somersault off the boat into the water. Again no pictures but it was really cool, and I found it less scary then getting into the water by just walking off the boat which is what you usually do.

After all our dives we took our final exam and then celebrated our accomplishments over beers and kisses for Jesper.