Dive, dive, dive!

The diving on Koh Tao has been spectacular!

We both finished our Basic Open Water course which consisted of some classroom work, a pretty easy exam and 4 dives, which took us down to 18 metres.

I then went on to do an advanced diving course which took me down to 30 metres and consisted of a further five dives in a day and a half, one of which was a night dive and was very eerie but also very cool as well as a wreck dive where I got the chance to explore a 50 metre, WWII ex-US navy ship called the HTMS Sattakut! This was awesome! Especially when it started to come into view out of the murky depths! It was like something out of a movie and made me feel like a navy seal on a secret mission! Lol!

Having done no diving before we came to Koh Tao I left the island with a total of 17 dives under my belt an a lot of footage from my recently acquired GoPro3 camera (one of the best gadgets I've bought!)

But by far the best experience was on Sunday 24th Feb when Katy and I went on a fun dive together.

After a long journey over a rough sea, that left about 80% of our fellow divers feeling sea sick and throwing up, we jumped into the sea. The waves were so high that we kept losing eye contact as we were thrown up and down. Finally the all ok was given and we began to descend under the waves.

The contrast between being thrown around on top of the sea to the quiet, peaceful tranquility beneath it was remarkable!

Within about a minute into our descent and at about 4 or 5 metres down our attention was drawn to this immense silhouette of a Whale Shark above us! Everybody froze in amazement at the sight of this creature swimming ever so slowly and gracefully only a couple of metres away from us! Time literally stood still as it swam these large figures of eight around us for about 5 or ten minutes. We could barely contain our excitement!

Apparently people can spend years and lots of dives trying to catch a glimpse of these magnificent creatures, which Katy and I were lucky enough to witness on what was only Katy's fifth ever dive!

Truly an amazing experience and one of the highlights of our trip so far!