Our awesome dive shop, Scuba Junction

We arrived on Koh Tao and were met right off the boat by someone from our dive shop, Scuba Junction.  We got the paperwork out of the way, settled in to our bungalow, and got started with our SSI Open Water course!  The bungalow was very convenient because it was a 30 second walk to the dive shop, and since it’s a small town on the island it was close to everything else as well.  We set it up through Scuba Junction and got a nice discount for when we were diving.

It's true!

The Open Water course took 3.5 days and included videos, dives, lots of skills to practice, a swimming test (a very easy one!), and of course homework.  There were four of us in the class, which was nice because it wasn’t too big.  Our teacher, Natalie, was really, really good and we were so glad to have her as our teacher.  To be honest, I was a little really freaked out at first about spending so much time underwater, but because she and the divemaster in training who was helping with our class were so good by the end of the course I was starting to feel like I couldn’t get enough!  It also helped that there were masses of cool fish and corals to see and I was loving learning what was what underwater.  That was another thing we liked about our school, they were really good about going over what fish we saw and telling us about them.

SCUBA gear

At the end of the Open Water course we all went out and celebrated being certified to dive down to 18 meters.  Our last couple of dives had been filmed, so they showed a cool video that an underwater filmography student put together of us diving up on a giant screen at the restaurant.  So cool!

Sairee Beach, just behind our dive school

After just one day off from diving we had decided that we hadn’t had enough, so we went back and did the SSI Advanced Adventurer course.  This one certified us to go down to 30 meters, so a lot deeper!  It was a different kind of course too, because there was very little class time, no homework, and we just got to pick five types of dives that we wanted to do, learn about them and then go and do them!  We did a buoyancy control dive, a navigation dive (and mini fish identification along the way), a shipwreck dive, a night dive, and a deep dive (down to 30 meters).  It was great to get some more experience and with this course we got to go to some of the further out and deeper dive sites and see some much bigger fish.  We especially loved our dives at Chumphon Pinnacle and Southwest.

Power lines are a lot less organized - a bit scary because you can really hear them hum!

The other thing that was great about this was that Koh Tao is a super place to hang out and we enjoyed our time out of class as well.  There are a surprising number of delicious restaurants, nice bars with beanbag chairs looking out over the beach, and we even tried having a Thai massage on one of our days off from diving.

Curry so good you want to drink it!

Our favorite Thai restaurant

Such a beautiful spot!

If you want to learn to dive Koh Tao and Scuba Junction are AWESOME.