Learning to dive part 2
credit: Alain76
After completing the PADI open water course I was hooked, I wanted to keep on diving. I started to look into options for diving in both the Great Barrier Reed and the Galapagos and unsurprisingly I found that the cost of diving in both locations was astronomical in comparison to Koh Tao. My cousin currently works as a dive master out in the Galapagos so I turned to her for some advice. Her recommendation was to take advantage of the cheap diving on Koh Tao so I decided to continue with the PADI program and signed up for the Advanced open water course, again with Big Bubble.
Completing the advanced course does not by any means make you an advanced diver, it just focuses on improving core skills and gives an insight into some specialities. Essentially taking the open water course one step beyond. The course comprises five “adventure dives”. These can be completed either independently over a period of time or can be done in the form of the advanced course, one after the other. I chose the latter option. Of the five dives it is mandatory that one be a deep dive down to 30 metres, extending the maximum depth of the open water certification by 12 metres, and another be a navigation dive where you are required to find your way around underwater using a compass and various forms of distance measurement. For the remaining three dives, the choice is left up to you.
Peak performance buoyancy was recommended to me as a fun way to improve my buoyancy. Before each dive there is a theory element involved, for this one the subjects of visualisation and the use of breathing to control your movement in the water were covered. After completing the required skills, our instructor started to play some games. We were swimming between each others legs, up over heads, upside down, backwards, and racing each other – it was an extremely fun dive.
My second choice was the naturalist dive. This doesn’t mean that I was diving naked, that be a naturist. The naturalist dive basically teaches you a bit about the underwater environment, things to look for, how things interact and how to find different kinds of fish. Our instructor combined this with fish identification and also multi level diving so that we got a bit of exposure to using a dive computer.
credit: Cold Water Diver
The course climaxed as I stepped off the boat into the darkness, clutching a torch as my only means of light, for a night dive. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend a night dive. Once again it gives a whole new perspective. You see things at night that you don’t notice during the day. Turning around to see eyes glowing in the coral is like seeing white eyes staring back from between the trees in the forest at night. In the darkness plankton glows and you can see tiny shrimp floating in it, quite a sight. For me the most interesting thing was seeing how the underwater life responds to the torch light. Stingrays would follow the spot light and larger fish used it to identify their prey so we had to be careful where we pointed it.
The advanced open water course marked the end of my diving on Koh Tao. The dives were all great fun, both improving my skills and opening my eyes to several different aspects of diving.
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