19th January 2012

After leaving the UK on the 14^th to Bangkok and spending a couple of days there shopping, we’re now finally settled in to our new place on Koh Tao. It’s pretty much the same as our old place but with a slightly different layout.  As the say here ‘Same same but different’. We’ll post some photo’s soon as at the moment, it looks as though a bombs hit it :-D

It’s only today that we’ve started back to work, teaching a 12 person Open Water course which we’ll split in half when it comes to the actual dives.   

The morning session went pretty well. We’d finished all the academics complete, equipment set ups were going well when we were told to give up some of our students equipment/tanks as the afternoon boat was short  ...Brilliant!!  NOT!     

So  a day that started off well, progressively got worse.   So not being able to complete set ups, we broke for lunch and met an hour later. Equipment wise, we were still no further ahead, so we walked down to the Regal pool and got our students to do their float and swim test.

Sometime later we eventually got in the pool and started confined.  The students did really well.  Si and I were really concerned about a couple of the girls who’d previously tried to do their OW and couldn’t get past the mask skills but with a little encouragement and a lot of patience they surprised themselves and us, to be honest and did a marvellous job.   

As a few of the guys had bad headaches, were cold and nearly out of air, we decided to call it a day with 90% of the confined skill complete.  We’ll reconvene tomorrow at 8.30am to finish off.

Sun burnt and exhausted, it’s definitely going to be an early night

x

Jenny