Koh Tao: Under the sea 🤿 🐠 🪸

We were very excited to start our diving adventure early the next day.
While we were given a huge Open Water course book, the dive shop was kind enough to also provide some informative videos which were much more manageable. It seemed like a lot of information at once but a lot of it also common sense.
Most important rule of diving: Don’t hold your breath. Thats because if you ascend the air in your lungs will expand inversely proportional to the atmospheric pressure - doubling within the first five meters. 🎈 💥
Also important is to stay calm and breathe slowly, like in yoga, and to always dive with a buddy.

The first day we spent at a deep pool to get comfortable with basic skills. We were lucky and only had one other person join us, Jonas from Denmark. Our instructor, Chris from South Africa, was super nice and knowledgeable. At first setting up our equipment seems very complicated and overwhelming but got easier over time. After a mandatory swim test we were ready to go.

The first breath you take under water feels quite strange, a part of your brain telling you that something is wrong. Fun fact it’s actually a reflex to hold your breath when the nose is wet. Slowly we get more comfortable and learned how to flood and clear our mask, take our mask off and on and take off our equipment in the water.
After a short break we then went to the deeper side of the pool (3m) and practiced buoyancy, emergency ascent and buddy breathing ( if one person is out of air).
Charly had a bit of discomfort equalizing because she had some congestion but it was okay.
Diving makes you really tired so we had a great night sleep and got up early the next day for our first real dive in the ocean.

Our first two dives were in Japanese gardens and Mango Bay, like swimming in a Sea Life aquarium. In the beginning we were still a bit preoccupied with how to stay calm and alive but the second one we felt more free to look around and appreciate the underwater beauty.

Unfortunately Charly had more trouble with equalizing her ears due to her blocked nose, so for safety we decided to interrupt our course abd finish it after our trip to Koh Pha-ngan. In retrospect the right decision because spending most energy and thoughts on equalizing isn’t very fun - and that’s what diving should be.

We really loved Koh Tao and our hotel so it was not a hardship to return there.Read more