We met up with the dive instructors at their shop in the
pouring down rain and I was really feeling reluctant about the whole
experience. We dived once before on our honeymoon in the Dominican Republic and
I was terrified the entire time. It’s not something that comes very naturally
to me and the fact that you have to think about each and every breath you take
is a little unnerving. However, it’s something George REALLY wanted to do and I
wasn’t against it, just a little cautious!
We got to the shore where all of the long tail boats are
stored around 8:30 and our “boat man” was waiting for us. The boat seriously
looked like something Christopher Columbus sailed to America in. But on a
smaller scale and it didn’t have sails, but instead an engine that looked like
a weed whacker. “Boat man” had a milk jug with the top cut off so he could also
bail out all of the water that was seeping in. If I wasn’t raised on boats with
my Daddy and understood that a bit of water in a wooden boat wouldn’t sink us,
it would have terrified me.
So the boat ride begins with all of our gear, lunch and
Jackie our dive instructor who was British and moved to Krabi just to be a dive
instructor for fun (awesome). It was pouring. And the waves were huge, and the
boat was small. Any ‘normal’ person would have probably gotten sick on the 45
minute ride out to Koh Si Island where we were going to dive, but I held it
together pretty well. I was a little mad we had to do this in the rain, but it
was fine.
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| This is the face George got because of the rain. Complete amusement, because of course this is something that would happen to us on our vacay, and sheer anger, because this is something that would happen to us on our vacy. My life story. :) |
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| Some of the long tail boats |
The boat man decided it wasn’t safe for us to go all the way
to Koh Si so we stopped at a small island next to the big Chicken Island and
did our first dive there. It took me a long time to get comfortable breathing
in and out of the aspirator thing (I’m probably going to make up these words
now because I don’t remember the real ones) and learning how to inflate and
deflate the puffer vest you have to wear, and put the weights on my hips. Plus
Jackie had never dived at this Chicken Island so she didn’t even know the depth
but was willing to take us down and figure it out. Luckily another dive company
pulled up and she asked them lots of questions. Those guys made me feel a
little better. But then we weren’t really sure how much weight to put on our
gear because we only knew our weight in pounds, she only understood ‘stones’
and the weights were marked in kilograms. Thankfully George had his iPhone with
him (Thanks Apple!) so we were able to figure it out. It was still raining up
until the point we got in the water, but we were really thankful that it
stopped (not that it matters anyways once you’re under the water cause you’re
already getting wet!)
It took me almost 20 minutes to get down under the water and
feel kind of comfortable and Jackie (bless her heart) held my hand the entire
dive. My mask was also leaking so every 5 minutes or so I’d have to stop and
clear it which is a really scary feeling. Imagine this: the mask is suctioned
to your face, but there’s water in it. You’re 10 meters underwater. So you have
to pull the top of your mask away from your head and let more water in, but not
too much or you will die (maybe that’s a little overdramatic), and then you
have to look down and shake your head so the water clears the glass on your
mask and then suction it back to the top of your face and release it from the
bottom of your face and blow out with your nose as hard as you can to get the
water out before more comes in. Except mine had an eternal leak so in 40
minutes I did this probably 10 times. Awful. And you have to remember to keep
breathing through your mouth/aspirator while you do this. Not so cool. And look
out for sharks.
We did get to see Nemo and his family and their anemone
which was really cool. We also saw some big gray speckled fish, a few Dory’s
and some other pretty scenery.
After the dive at Chicken Island Boat man said it was safe
to go to Koh Si, where we had planned to dive in the first place so we took
another boat ride out there and anchored out. Jackie switched masks with me so the
next dive was a lot better. I was more comfortable and a little high on oxygen
so it was all good. (That’s also probably not true) but we enjoyed this dive
even better. The coral was brighter and we saw a really neat stingray and lots
of beautiful tropical fish. It made me never want to own an aquarium again.
Those fish seemed happy in their anemones with their fishy friends. :)
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| Us in our scuba gear before we dove in Koh Si |
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| Some of the tropical fish that swam up to greet us |
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| Chicken Island |
We made it back to the hotel and were changing to head to the beach when I went to unzip my suitcase and there were ants on my bag. And I mean tons of them. So I unzipped my bag and found hundreds of ants in there. After 3 hours of shaking out each item of clothing I owned, using “off” on them (we didn’t have anything else) and cleaning out my purse we were finally rid of the ants and had changed hotel rooms. Basically what happened was: on the plane ride over from Japan I was given a 3 Musketeers bar and I was “saving it for later” and it was in my purse. I think that people are less likely to steal from you if they have to search for something, so I always put my purse in my suitcase and zip it. It’s harder to steal things than if it were just sitting out in the room. (Or so my theory goes). And somewhere in there ants had crawled into my purse to eat my 3 Musketeers and multiplied times a million and then we I put that in my bag they crawled all over my clothes. It was sick. It was certainly the low point of the trip.
So we made it through that, and then walked along the beach
and took some fun pictures and then had drinks and dinner at a restaurant in
town. It was a good day but those ants really put a damper on that part of the
trip.
Tokyo Time
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