Certifiably Diving!

Koh Tao, Thailand - Well, it's official Betsy and I are now certified divers! Woohoo! We completed our Open Water course with two dives yesterday, one called White Rock and the other Japanese Gardens. It was great fun and we both really enjoyed it. We got down to a depth of about 20m (60ft) and got to see a lot of interesting things.

The highlights of the dives yesterday were probably a blue spotted stingray and a school of barracuda that we swam through. We also were chased by a titan triggerfish (nasty little buggers!). Apart from that we saw all the usual suspects including sea urchin, "nemo" fish, bannerfish and an assortment of other colored creatures and critters.

The course was a blast, our instructor Woz was awesome and our classmates Rebecca and Clive were good fun. The school we went with Simple Life Divers was excellent and all the staff were great and very accomodating with us having to delay our diving a few days due to Betsy's cold.

We were accompanied on our open water dives yesterday by a videographer (thanks Amber) who filmed our setup and diving and turned it into a 20min DVD. We got to watch it last night at a local watering hole and it was great fun. Look for it in stores everywhere soon!

Since we have enjoyed ourselves so much we have decided to do the advanced open water certification which consists of 5 dives including a deep dive to 30m (100ft), underwater navigation, fish identification, a night dive and a buoyancy control dive.

This new found love for diving has altered our travel plans once again as we are now planning our trip around what dive locations we can hit.

We've been in Koh Tao for a week now and will probably be here another week. We are enjoying the island and not in any real hurry to move on at this point.