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February 11, 2006
PADI Certified Advanced Open Water...at last
The next day I woke up bright and early and was at the dive shop over twenty minutes early. There I meet for the first time my Advanced Open Water instructor, Johannes from Sweden. After two cups of coffee and a loose discussion of the three dives we will do day, every starts to load up the truck. An hour later we are on M/v Petchmanee headed on a two hour cruise for our first dive site, the wreck of the ferry Kingcruiser, where we will accomplish my first PADI Adventure Course, the wreck dive. Cool.
We suit up and jump in the water with the other dozen or so divers. After descending to some 18m we encounter the 1997 wreck we begin to circumnavigate the 85m long ferry clockwise. It is starting to collapse but a few brave divers pop inside for a quick peak. That kind activity is way out of the scope of our dive so we continue on checking out the wreck. Besides the aquatic life, like eels and scorpion fish, we came across the caved in roof of the ferry’s latrine with porcelain toilets very much intact in comparison to the remainder of the vessel. Our dive took us as went as deep as 24m which limited our time and we had to surface after 37 minutes.
After surfacing, unsuiting, drinking some orange Gatorade-like drink and some 75 minutes later Johannes and I were back in the water at Anemone Reef. There he took me on Underwater Naturalist Adventure Dive, along with a big, blonde Ozzie who was also working on his Advanced Open Water certification. His situation was sorta funny because he was actually in Krabi on his honeymoon, but his wife was up in Bangkok visiting relatives and shopping. (Her parents are Thai.) Some honeymoon! Anyway, our big goal for the dive is to circumnavigate a reef (clockwise again) and take notes on five different aquatic life forms. I really grooved on this and took detailed notes on seven different things with an effort to be diverse: coral, plants and fish. It turns out what I thought were plants, some sea fans, are actual a form of coral. Learn something new every day. After 43 minutes at depths up to 22m we surface again, unsuit and it’s lunch time.
While eating lunch, along with the other few diving boats from the local area, a shout from the Phi Phi Scuba vessel asked if we had any cigarettes, even offering to pay for them. Two minutes later a beautiful blonde women was swimming over to our boat declaring, and this is a direct quote, “I am not desperate, just drunk”. We all had a good laugh out of it and she made off with a few fags to hold her over. Junkies, the lot of them.
After an hour and forty some minutes we arrive, get our gear on again and dive onto Shark Point for the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy Adventure Course. We had to do silly things like hold our fins and levitate like a Jedi Master, swim around and then over another diver, approach them from the back, float over then and then come down head first until we were looking at their crotch.
A seemingly more important exercise consisted of an instructor handing up a 0.8kg dive belt weight and we had to hold our current depth without using our BCD. I’m pleased to say that I did fairly well at most of these assignments. My fellow Ozzie diver had much more difficulty but we discussed it top side and we he seemed to be overcompensating on both downwards and upwards movements and depending on his BDC too much. After 45 minutes underwater we surfaced for the last time, debriefed, ate some fresh watermelon and pineapple, and headed back in for the two hour journey to Ao Nang.
Knowing now to behave myself, once we reached shore I had a quick dinner with Terje again, did some internet junky stuff, and hit the sake early—tomorrows dive was starting an hour early and we needed to be at the dive center at 6:45am. Ouch!
Once we finished our now routine dive center-to-dive boat transfer we were off an and extra long three hour voyage to Koh Haa Yai. There we had two pairs of Advanced Course: Deep Diver students, the Ozzie and myself. Before the dive we had two complete two silly exercises. The first was to spell our name backwards and the second to pick out numbers from a 4x4 grid with the squares numbered from 1 to 16. Our instructor timed our results so that we could compare with our times down deep when we would should be under the increasing (as the deeper you get) effects of nitrogen narcosis. We kept separate for the initial exercises, which turned out to very interesting: I was faster at the exercises at 29m than I was shipside. When Johannes wrote the results on his slate a laughed through my regulator so hard is was audible to everyone around us. Too funny.
After that the Ozzy’s instructor had some eggs with him which he broke open and we played with the yolk. It was interesting because it the pressure condensed it so much that you could push on it and your finger indentation would stay in it until manipulated later. The fish were also interested and we had to keep ushering them away. Afterwards we slowly ascended until we were ready to surface
Now that I think about it, before we descended to depth we also went through some caves at Koh Haa Yai. One could look up and see the surface of the water, but it was not exposed to the open atmosphere, which was really cool. At one point it got a little narrow and my fins kicked the sides, but other than that all was cool.
After ascending and boarding the dive boat we spend nearly two hours moving onto the next dive site, Koh Hoa Lagoon. There we were to complete my most dreaded Advanced Course, the underwater navigation dive. This stems from my follies in Marbella, Spain where I completed my initial Open Water certification and really disliked the underwater navigation exercise. Anyway, things went OK. There was this one area where we started out every maneuver where locally known porcupine fish hangs out. I forget his name, but it is something like "Perky". He is like a cat that demand attention and wants people to rub his underside…so much so that he gets in the way of what we are trying to accomplish.
Anyway, we complete the four navigation tasks and then head off to check out some rare aquatic life that Johannes is really excited about. They were interesting, but I can’t exactly put to words what they looked like.
We surface, board, head back for Ao Nang on the three hour trip and everyone relaxes…eating fruit, sleeping on the foredeck of the boat, a beer or two, and chatting. Very relaxing. Once we get to shore we all head back for the dive center where Johannes and I filled out the log book and paperwork for my official PADI Advanced Open Water certification. Oh, yea, I also had to drop over 13,000 Baht on the old UBS MasterCard.
Posted by stu at February 11, 2006 05:59 PM