Category Archives: Ko Tao

There isn’t a real University of Koh Tao, not that I am aware of anyway. But Sairee Beach has so many resemblances to a college campus, I thought the name was apt.

Most people seem to be here to study. Study scuba, that is. You initially try to schedule your classes/dives in the afternoon, so you can sleep late, but then you realize that the best classes/dives are in the morning, so you suck it up and enroll in the program for which you must arise at 6 am. Some people are clearly here to learn, then get out to the big wide world of Other Dive Sites. Others start learning here, decide to stay, and eventually become instructors or part of the infrastructure. Town/gown relations seem to be good; the ladies who work reception at our bungalows seem to like us, as do the Thai folks at the various places we go, and the Thai folks on staff at our dive school (all of the support staff, from the boat captain to reception to the guys who fill the tanks).

Of course, there are the occasional irks of college life. I missed hearing Phil Hartnoll of Orbital and a bunch of other good djs play the other night because I had a big test our first deep water dive that morning. Well, I sort of missed it. I wasn’t there. But I actually woke up at 4:30 am thinking, oh my god that’s beautiful music… The party was still raging, and loud enough that I could hear it halfway down the beach. It was lovely to lie there and listen for a while, and then get an extra hour of sleep before the deep dives.

I missed the party, but I did take a great extracurricular – I took a flying trapeze class. The owner of the shop, a pleasant woman, has a nice rig and her lesson down to a science. First, on a static trapeze, they show you how to go from hanging by your hands to hanging by your knees (you have to kick up at the very end of the swing, and not before!) Then you swing from your knees, stretching your arms like superman and arching your back. It is from this position that you make contact with the catcher – you grab each others arms and release the knees from your own bar! You are flying!

I also learned how to let go of the trapeze and do a full somersault before landing on the net. It was so much fun that I would have kept doing it every day were we not diving every day. As it is, I will definitely try it again in SF. Don’t worry, mom, in addition to the net there was also a belt with ropes attached to slow and control your fall. It was very safe; probably the most dangerous part was climbing the ladder.

If this is a university, the mascot would certainly be the Siamese cat. We have seen them elsewhere in Thailand, but never in such abundance as here. It appears to be a recessive coat color rather than a special breed, about as rare as tortoiseshell cats in the states.

– the private eye

Ps. diving has been amazing too, but the professor has written so much about that, I will skip it.

We’ve now settled in to Ko Tao. We are staying at least until the 23rd, and might stay longer depending on how our Ko Phagnan plans shape up. The full moon party is on the 26th, and finding a room can be difficult. If we can arrange one from here, we might leave later. Otherwise we will probably need to leave on the afternoon of the 23rd. We’ve moved from our B1200 bungalow to a much smaller and minimal B400 one:

Our diving schedule is this:

• Jan. 17: arrive, arrange for refresher course, sleep
• Jan. 18: refresher classroom in the morning, skill refresher and fun dive in the afternoon
  (Twins)
• Jan. 19: arranged for dives and courses in the morning, fun dives in the afternoon (Twins, White Rock)
• Jan. 20: fun dive in the morning, deep diving classroom in the afternoon
• Jan. 21: deep dives in the morning, nitrox classroom in the afternoon
• Jan. 22: nitrox dives in the morning, wreck classroom in the afternoon
• Jan. 23: wreck dives in the morning, catch the ferry to Ko Phagnan in the afternoon?

Deep diving is learning about the issues and dangers that arise when you go below 60ft, which is approximately 3 atmospheres of pressure. The basic summary is that you need to be more careful when you ascend because you can have nitrogen in your blood at higher pressure. That’s the really dangerous thing in diving: coming up too quickly from higher pressure, so gas dissolved in your body forms bubbles (like a soda you have just opened). Nitrox is using a gas mixture that has a higher oxygen content (lower nitrogen) than regular air, which lets you stay down longer, something very useful when diving deep. You have to learn about oxygen poisoning and new dive tables. Finally, wreck diving is learning skills and guidelines for diving sunken shipwrecks, such as don’t touch anything because it might fall on you. You typically want deep diving certification for wrecks because they are deep, and nitrox as well so you can stay that deep for more than 5 or 10 minutes.

Our instructor for the refresher course was Leane, an English woman who used to work in corporate finance and wants to return to school for a Ph.D. in psychology, most of all at… Stanford! We talked a little about it and I offered to talk with her about her motivations and whether a Ph.D. is right for her. She was a fantastic instructor. The Private Eye sometimes takes 2-3 minutes in her initial descent (her ears equalize slowly), and Leane was very supportive, helpful, and patient. We did lots of high fives under water.

Today, our dive leader was Rachel, also from England, who used to be a punk, loves hip hop, and I’m sure could beat me up in a fight (not that that’s saying much). She was also excellent. When we found a lionfish hiding on a rock, something she had recently discovered and not told many about yet, she did a little underwater fist pump dance. Enthusiasm is infectious!

After a dive, you log what you did: how deep, how long, where, when, conditions, and what you saw. The post dive logging generally involves the dive leader walking you through everything you saw, a long list of fish, coral, sea cucumbers, and crustaceans. But, in all honesty, these aren’t the things that capture my attention or imagination. The lionfish was kinda cool, yeah, but the moments that made me stop and stare were much larger in scale. Like the time on our first dive when I looked up at the reflective surface of the water and saw silhouetted two schools of fish, one made up of hundreds of silvery fish about 6 inches long, the other 8 longtail fishes, these yellow, black, and white fish that are about a foot long and have a long, thin, white trailing fin on the top of their body. These hundreds of fish filled my field of view, not quite blotting out the sun but putting me in deep shade. Or, in our White Rock dive, when I looked down in a deep region and couldn’t see the bottom, just a blue green nothingness below, with shadows of fishes of all sizes flitting back and forth before fading into the unknown depth.

We have chosen this dive schedule because one of the instructors at our school, on hearing we wanted to dive the Liberty wreck, nodded a lot and said it is a fantastic dive. So in our agenda of seeking peak experiences, spending our time on Ko Tao diving to learn skills so we can dive the wreck is the plan.

Our camera can actually go to 10m underwater. I’m going to see if we can get some pictures to post. Given we are diving deep it might be tough, but hopefully I can figure out a way.

— The Professor