Diving on the Island

That night, we woke up with a start—an ear-piercing scream had jolted us from our sleep. We debated for a long time whether we should venture out from the safety of our mosquito net. Jan wasn’t exactly the brave type, so he more or less coaxed/pushed me out of bed to investigate the sounds. I quickly decided that I didn’t want to find out what was causing the scream, so I hopped back into bed pretty fast. It wasn’t until the next morning that we discovered the source of the scream... a gecko. We had a 50 cm long gecko living in our bathroom. It screamed every night after that, but at least we knew where the sound was coming from. Since a gecko is completely harmless, we let it stay in the bathroom. The diving school started at 9 AM, so we had just enough time to read a bit before it began. We kicked things off by going through the first three chapters and taking a quiz, which thankfully went well. There were six of us in the group, all Danes, and our instructor was also Danish, which made the lessons a lot easier. We had lunch with Henrik and Tina at the restaurant that belongs to Big Fish. They were super nice, and we ended up spending a lot of time with them over the next few days. In the afternoon, we had to try on the diving gear since we needed to be ready to dive at 2 PM. A pickup truck drove us down to the harbor. We were crammed in the back with all the equipment. The boat ride took about half an hour to another island. There were some decent waves, but luckily no one got seasick. Before learning how to assemble and put on our diving gear, we had to swim three laps around the boat so our instructor could assess our swimming skills. It’s incredibly heavy to wear the gear on land. We were shown how to jump into the water. Jan was one of the first to leap in. I was a bit more hesitant. But in we all went, signaling to the boat that we were okay. We swam on the surface to shallower water, where we sat in a circle underwater and did various exercises. We were close enough to the surface that we could stand up if we panicked or had trouble with an exercise. We practiced for about an hour but didn’t manage to get through all the exercises since some were trickier than others. On the way back to the boat, we got to try diving for the first time. We swam past a bunch of beautiful striped fish but didn’t see any corals because we weren’t skilled enough to control our buoyancy. We would have just ended up touching or falling onto the corals, which would have damaged them. When we got back to the boat, it was really tough to climb out of the water after being weightless. The ride back to Koh Tao was pretty bumpy, but thankfully everyone managed to avoid seasickness again. We got home around 7 PM, where we had planned to have dinner with Tina and Henrik. We chatted with them until 10 PM, after which we went to bed completely exhausted from our first dive.