Today is the day that Dad and I spent the morning SCUBA diving. After a rigorous training regime in the hotel pool yesterday, we were ready to take on the ocean. By 8am we had met our instructor - a little Frenchman named Sasha, boarded the dive boat, and were heading out to the dive site. We were going to make two 1 hour dives around the island of Koh Ha, which is pretty much 5 lumps of rock surrounded by coral reef. During the boat trip Sasha took the opportunity to take us through some more hand signals, including "Oh god, I'm out of air, please help me, I'm dying!". He joked that we wouldn't need that one, but more on that later!

After an hour, we reached the first dive site - a small lagoon just off a white sandy beach. There was no time to waste; it was on with the kit, which makes you look like a right pratt when you're not in the water. We then had a quick drill on how to jump off the boat and before we knew it, we were in the water.

Now then, last time Dad and I went diving, we saw one school of fish, so on this dive I would have been happy just to see one interesting fish. Nothing could have prepared me for what we were about to see.

We dived under and followed Sasha down to 30 feet. It was like being dropped into a fish tank. Not because it was full of plastic plants, and fluorescent yellow shipwrecks, but because there were fish everywhere! Not even on a David Attenborough programme had we seen so many different types of fish. To name just a few, we saw puffer fish, parrot fish, moray eels, trumpet fish, and half the cast of Finding Nemo; they refused to give autographs though. Prima donnas!

I had spotted a cute little jelly fish swimming along; it was only an inch or too long and looked harmless. It was around that time that we all started to feel a stinging sensation, like a nettle sting. This is when the little jelly fish came back with hundreds, if not thousands of it's little mates. For the most part we were able to swim under them, however, they were all hanging round our boat. There was nothing we could do but swim straight up through the cloud of them. Sasha was signing that we needed to stop (in the middle of the cloud I might add) and do the pre-surfacing checks. Based on the fact that he was wearing a full body wetsuit and we weren't, I chose to ignore him and carried on.

We got out and compared battle scars. Dad had red marks all over his arms, I had some on my face, and we both got stung on the lip. The stings didn't particularly hurt, they were more of an irritation if anything. This is just as well, because I didn't fancy someone having to pee on me to neutralise them.

After an hour for lunch, the stings had gone and we were ready for the next dive. This time we moved round to the other side of the island were the water was deeper (and had no jelly fish).

This time we saw a Banded Sea Snake lying on the coral, which, research tells me, is one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. Sasha decided to poke it - apparently he's never heard of Steve Irwin. I'm glad it didn't move because I'd have screamed.

On the way back to the boat Sasha check my tank gauge (or george as he kept calling it), the needle was hovering just above empty. To further complicate things, a fisherman had parked his boat in the way so we had to wait for him to move before we could surface. It was a bit too close a call for my liking.

On the return trip the captain of the boat thought he saw a whale. Everyone was on the look out and a few minutes later, sure enough we saw the spray from the whale coming up for air. We tracked it for 10 minutes but then it disappeared. Dad got a picture of it though.

Mum and Sherie spent the day on the beach, drinking cocktails.

James

Quote of the day "Oh look there is a cute little jelly fish" - James