Machine Gunning 30m Down and Swimming with Sharks

Koh Tao is a budget diving island. All three of the friends I was traveling with decided to go and get their open water certification, but since I already had mine, I decided to get my advanced open water certification at the same time, meaning that I'm allowed to go deeper than before. Getting the advanced certification is way more fun than the regular open water one. It involves five specialty dives, in my case they were navigation, peak performance buoyancy, night, deep, and wreck dives. The wreck was a warship, complete with swiveling guns. Over the course of one and half days I did all five dives and had a blast. I don't have an underwater camera, but my instructor did take a few pictures the last day of class.

We explored the island on foot, walking to the highest peak and then down to a beach where the map said there was cliff diving. It turned out to be a beautiful beach, but surrounding it were creepy deserted bungalows with either mushroom or jellyfish graffiti on them. We weren't sure which. We did some good snorkeling around the area and looked for a deep spot right near the cliff that we could dive into, but never found one.

It was a cloudy day and we couldn't see where the sun was in the sky. We left a bit later than we should have an almost got caught out in the dark. I had more of a sense of urgency than my friends and they teased me for it and in the end it turned out fine. We made it back to a road with streetlights just as darkness set it and stumbled onto a delicious German restaurant, the best food we had during our stay. Massey had been sweating a river all day and that night consumed more liquids in a two hour period than I thought humanly possible.

The last day on the island, Sarah and I had planned to go to Sharks Bay where we had been told that on any given day, we would have an 80 percent chance of encountering a shark. A storm blew in at the last minute and Sarah decided not to go, but that didn't stop me. I walked in the rain to the deserted beach and slid into the water, bypassing the net-protected swimming area. Visibility was poor and fish kept emerging from the silt right in front of my face. Swimming alone in murky, shark-infested waters is one of the scarier things I've done in my life. Every object I saw looked like a shark at first and gave me a lurch. As I got farther out, the depth increased to ten or 15 meters and visibility improved. Suddenly, I saw movement deep down near the bottom and focused my eyes on a one to one and a half meter shark. I followed it for awhile, swimming away from the shore before I lost sight of it. It's amazing how different the ocean looks from behind a snorkel mask than from a beach chair.