Diving in Ko Tao

I spent 6 days on Ko Tao, 4 of which were mostly taken up by scuba lessons. It turned out my class consisted only of me and one other student and we had an instructor as well as a student instructor, so pretty much one on one learning. We started in the classroom which was air conditioned and made me eager to learn. After getting the basics including what not to do, we went to the pool in the afternoon. We had to do a bunch of exercises getting us comfortable with breathing underwater and dealing with situations that might arise like your mask falling off, or the regulator (breathing apparatus) coming out of your mouth. My mask didn't fit well, so I spent much of my time clearing it of water. At least I got really good at that. That was it for the first day, and the next day we headed to the ocean. We went to a bay where there was some really shallow water, and did mostly the same stuff as we had in the pool. Everything worked fine, and we got to see a few fish. The next day we went out with a bunch of other classes on a larger boat. We had to climb across and through 3 other boats while carrying all our scuba gear to get to our boat, which was not really fun but this time I didn't fall down on the boat at least. We went down to a depth of 12 metres this time, and I had some trouble equalizing the pressure in my ears on the way down, but once there I felt good. There were some fantastic fish around. We saw angelfish,





batfish,






parrotfish,






some barracudas,







a moray eel, a hermit crab, and lots of other fish that I can't remember and wouldn't even know what they're called.

The next day we went out to another dive spot and this time went to 18 metres. It's actually hard to tell how deep you are anyways, so it didn't feel much different from the day before. We only had to do a couple more exercises to finish all the things needed for certification, and one was taking your mask off and putting it back on at the bottom. This was really not my favourite thing to do because you have to make sure you don't breathe through your nose when the mask is off, which isn't so easy. Before we went in the water though, our instructor told us he had a surprise for us underwater that would make us take our mask off. When it was time to do it, he pulled a gun out of his pocket and waved it at us, so we really did have to take the mask off. He was a really funny guy and good to have as a teacher. Afterwards we got to swim around some more and see some fish and coral. There's this cool type of coral that looks like colourful blossoms on a rock, and it you wave your hand in front of it they all close up, then reopen a minute later. Underwater life is cool.