28Feb

DISCOVERING A NEW PASSION

Posted by: anke* Categories: DIVING THAILAND ~ DIVE SITES

{KOH TAO, Thailand ~ February 18-27, 2015}

Learn something new! Try out something new, as often as you can in your life! With that in mind, diving came up.

It never crossed my mind before until a friend of mine was telling me all about diving, the great places she’s been and the amazing underwater world.

So what to do during Chinese New Year in 2015 when billions of Chinese pack their bags and travel to families or all around the world….? Learn diving!

Good planning and research is key! There are a gazillion places where you can learn diving and if you google you will be overwhelmed with all the different recommendations. Where to go – where not to go etc etc.

I can only share my experience and what my expectations were and maybe it helps.

WHERE TO GO
After lots of research the decision was made: Koh Tao is the place. It’s the island of all diving newbies and there are a lot of dive centers offering Open Water, Advanced Open Water and all other kind of diving licenses.

Out of over 30 dive centers in Koh Tao, we picked Ban’s Diving Resort. One of the bigger centers with a good reputation and a combined package offer of license plus accommodation.

WHAT TO CONSIDER
My recommendation to everyone who considers learning to dive is to plan enough vacation days.
Getting a diving license is a different type of “holiday”. The days are full on with a mix of classroom lessons, practice lessons and preparations in the evening for the next day. At the end of every day I was completely exhausted.

OPEN WATER – OR – ADVANCED OPEN WATER LICENSE?
If you plan for an OPEN WATER license, be prepared to be hooked by the beauty of the underwater world. And if that happens, your Open Water license might not be enough and you consider ADVANCED OPEN WATER.
This actually happened to me.
After the first few dives I knew that this is my thing! The peace, the colors of the ocean, all the creatures and fishes down there. I entered a completely new world. A world that I haven’t seen before and a world that is so beautiful that I knew I want to see more of it!
Luckily I planned enough days so I extended my Open Water course to get an ADVANCED Open Water.

THE DIVING RESORT
Apparently, Ban’s Diving Resort is known to be a “mass production” of diving newbies. In fact, it is big! Maybe the biggest Diving Center on Koh Tao island and therefore the classes are up to 10 students or more. However, I felt absolutely safe and well taken care of! Every dive was accompanied by multiple Dive Masters and even though the dive group under water was around 10 student, we had 1 Dive master per dive couple. After a few dives they figured out the diving level of everyone and started to rearrange students with Dive Masters.
After 9 dives including a night dive, classroom lessons and some exams I was the proud holder of an ADVANCED OPEN WATER license! “Underwater world here I come”.

A new passion was born!

GETTING A LICENSE
All in all I had a total of 9 dives and some theory lessons with exam until I got the Advanced Open Water license.

One of the dives was a night dive. Good experience but also scary. It’s pitch black and it was quite difficult to keep track of depth, space and direction as all you see is what’s in the ray of the torch. I was fully focusing on the dive an making sure I don’t get lost that I didn’t really see much of the night life.

We were a fun group of around 10 people and 4 instructors doing the Open Water License. For the advanced we were only 3 + instructor. Perfect!

On the last dive I had the chance to take my GoPro with me. Unfortunately most of the photos turned out blurry…. There was just too much going on: concentrating on the dive, discovering the sea-life and then fiddling around with the camera. If you do your license, I don’t recommend you take a camera with you.

Most of our dives were around Chumphon Pinnacle, Red Rock, White Rock and Twin Peaks.

WHY KOH TAO AND NOT THE MALDIVES?
Of course there are far more amazing, mind-blowing, stunning and breathtaking dive sites than Koh Tao. So why not getting a license there…?
There are a few reasons why not:
In general, I would never start with the best of the best because everything else would then be a step down.
While you’re getting your license, understand the technics, get the right buoyancy, ensure the right equipment set-up and so on, it is difficult to also fully focus on the amazing underwater world. There are times when your mask gets foggy, you fiddle around with the air in your BCD or you have to practice navigation so that you most likely miss the huge turtle, the cute little box fish, the amazing seahorse – and that would be a shame.

Get your license first, go diving whenever you have time and save all the amazing dive sites for later, once diving becomes as easy and intuitive as cycling.

So what’s the next new thing to learn…?

Cheers a*