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Full Moons and Underwater Rescue

I'll go ahead and appologize that it's been a few days since my last entry. These past few days have been fairly busy including two underwater rescues, a 10 hour overnight ferry to the port of departure, and the famous full moon party.

Let's begin with the underwater rescues. I mentioned that I had decided to continue my diving in Koh Phi Phi. Initially I thought I would get my advanced diver certificate in Koh Tao, but once I got to P.P. it seemed to make more sense (despite a few extra bucks) to continue my diving there. Which means I needed to do 5 more dives including navigation, deep, and 3 of choice. The first dive was the deep dive, going down to 30 meters, doing some skills and finishing up with a swim around. By chance it was just my instructor and myself diving.

After a short boat ride to small beatiful island we suited up and dove down to 30m. No sooner had we reached the bottom when we spotted what looked like a huge cage with loads of tropical fish. Sweet huh? Yeah I thought so too, and then I realized by the frantic pissed off look of my instructor that in fact it was not sweet. Simple truth, divers hate fishermen and fishermen hate divers, and from what I understood (later) these fish were being caught illegally to be sold. My instructor tried cutting through the metal with her knife. Nothing. Then I realized there was an opening tied shut with some rope and after a little finageling we had the cage open and schools of imprisoned fish set free. Lesson one- Deep dive/Underwater rescue :Success.

The next rescue came on my final dive but did not envolve creatures of scale, rather one ignorant American diver. There are two basic things you need to remember when diving. 1.Breath-never hold your breath. And 2. Watch your air so you don't run out. Well breathing came naturally for me so didn't really have any problems there, however, the second one(I learned) can sneak right up on you.

My final dive I chose to do underwater photography (which by the way I suck at). But the thing is I'm not a guy that likes to focus on many things at one time. I've always felt you should put all your energy into one thing then move on to the next. In this case, the thing was photography, and what didn't get my attention was my air gages. When you are working so hard to a bunch of crappy undecernable pictures, you tend to use a lot of air. We approached the end of the dive and I look down to see I have one bar of air left. The problem is you have to decompress for a short amount of time at 5 m down so as not to get the bends. So in this rescue the fish was Derek and the cage was stupidity. Anyway, it may sound worse than it was. I shared the air of my instructor to decompress as we had learned previously and proceeded to the surface.

Both rescues were a first for my instructor. Needless to say she was more excited about one than the other. Other highlights included swimming with baracuda on a night dive, and the plankton (or whatever) that lights up at night when stired--very cool like a bunch of tiny stars sparkeling in the pitch black ocean.

Moving on. Next was the return to Phangnan Island (which I had already broken in with some sick dance moves) for the full moon party. But to get there I was scheduled for a 10 hour overnight ferry. I had done the ferry once before and any transportation you are expected to sleep on is ok with me. We board the boat, business as usual and set sail. The next morning we pull up to the dock where things are looking oddly familiar. Things tend to look familair when you are returning to the exact dock you left from some 10 hours earlier. I guess overnight our boat broke down and had to be taxied back to the dock. Several hours later, after a bus ride to a different town we left on a 3 hour ferry. This time we made it.

And now one final note on the full moon party. As soon as you arrive to Thailand you start hearing of people planning their trips for this party. I had been to the island before so had a pretty good idea of what to expect, or so I thought. I have never seen anything like it. Imagine 10-20,000 people dancing on a beach about 2-300 yards long until 7 in the morning when the sun rose. It was unbelievable. I met up Christina (my friend from Flagstaff), and then later she left with her Italian friend from Phuket, and I found some Spaniards (who are in some history books credited with the creation of dance) that I met the day before. I would tell you more about it but I've already written way too much, something I commited not to do in a previous blog. And besides that it was unbelievable, so why even talk about it? I mean if your not going to believe me anyway. Maybe when you're older and we've work through some of these trust issues we can talk about it more. But right now it's time for one young sir to go to bed.

posted by Travelin' D @ 3:17 AM