Diving, Diving and More Diving!

Not much to report, our last two days have been consumed by diving academics and practicals, then a little snorkling, beach vegging, beach-side dinner and then early to bed for our early morning dives. Yesterday we begun the morning learning basic skills in the pool, we haven't reached the real open water yet and already we love diving, the skills we're learning while basic are blowing our minds. After lunch we sat for a couple of hours academics in our open-air beach side classroom while it poured rain outside, this has been the only bit of bad weather we've experienced so far and we were thrilled to be busy inside the classroom for most of the day.

Another thing we love about Koh Tao is the beachside, fire or candle-lit dining. Our favorite restaurant is a deck just a bit above the beach built around a lofty tree which is strung with twinkly lights and lanterns, the beach is lined with fronds, tiki torches and small glowing fire pits - pure paradise!

Today we experienced our first two open water dives and took our final exam for our PADI Open Water Certification . We're happy to report we both passed with flying colors and will be officially certified tomorrow after our next two dives. Our first dive was at Aow Muang which translates to Mango Bay, we spent about 40 minutes underwater with our instructors checking out fish and getting accustomed to breathing 12 meters beneath the sea.

Our next dive was off of Nang Yuan Island (a small island off of Koh Tao) which is hailed by the Thais as one of the most beautiful islands in the world. So far we've only inspected this from underwater but we intend to take a day trip here on our last day in Koh Tao. On our second dive we dropped just 10 meters below sea level, the visibility and the color of the water was unreal! We saw a moray eel, some creepy long blue and white stripped snake (eek), huge parrot fish and a stunning angel fish about the size of a basketball, amongst thousands and thousands of unknown (to us) fish, at one point we looked up and saw so many fish that it was difficult to see the surface of the water - this was our favorite part of the dive. we're both LOVING our diving experience and are looking forward to making this a joint hobby for many years to come.

Tomorrow we have another early dive - we're hoping to catch sight of a whale shark and the black tipped reef sharks (also known as the friendly sharks of Thailand). Afterwards we're going to celebrate the completion of the diving course with our 10 classmates and two instructors over dinner and drinks - should be a fun day. This time we're going to remember to bring our camera on the boat that way we can post a few diving photos.

Thank you to everyone who has posted comments, it's wonderful to have this connection to everyone at home - keep them coming :)