Wednesday - Apr. 16, 2003

Alright! We're now certified for advanced open water as well aftwer doing 5 more dives. We did three yesterday and the last one was a nightdive, pretty intense and out-of-this world considering diving during the day is far out in itself.

During day dives we went as deep as 30m/100 ft, but we saw more interesting stuff at 18m. Beautiful creatures like blue spotted stingray, the cute box fish, angel fish, banded fish, parrot fish, pufferfish, star fishes, etc. Our instructor and divemaster saw a moray eel but I wasn't brave enough to peek into holes and cracks.

There is also a clown fish named Sebastian that Luke trained to pick food and tiny shells from his fingers then drop it in his hand.

Koh Tao means turtle island because there used to be a lot of green turtles here, but now they're not as common. Some of our fellow divers did see one yesterday.

What is common here, though, are trigger fishes -- big and nasty fishes notorious for attacking divers in defense of their territories. We saw a couple and obediently steered clear when Luke gave the signal. Incidentally, the mascot on Buddha View's logo and t-shirts is a trigger fish.

During the nightdive we saw a couple of barracudas hunting for fish. They were huge, about 4-5 ft long. It was coooool.

I had a brief scare last night because my mask got flooded just when I started to float up and I hit the inflator instead of the deflator so I went straight up and nearly hit the surface. Luckily for me the rope was right above so I was able to grab it and stay under for another few minutes to clear my mask and normalize my breathing. We were supposed to have a 3-minute safety stop at 5 meters when that happended, but I didn't feel any ill effects so I'm okay.

Brian also saw what happened and stayed close to me. I was surprised he even recognized me, but he said he could tell which one is me because of the way I move.