01 January 2017

Many Happy Returns,  Rob!!!

Hope you celebrate in style :-D

Thinking of you and sending lots of love,

Hugs,

Jenny & Simon

 X X X 

31st December 2016

A fresh new year is once again upon us. It’s the time to be thankful for the blessings of the past year and to take stock of all our achievements. At the same time, New Year 2017 is a brand new year to start afresh, to start strong, and yet another chance to do everything we want to do this year.

Love & hugs

Jenny & Simon

X X X

28th December 2016

Boxing Day gathering at Fi's

The Mandry folk on Christmas Day

Pretty Ladies

Feeling the festive cheer!

Christmas day for Simon and I was a lovely quiet affair.  We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves but of course we missed the family terribly.

It was just great that we managed to catch everyone at the right time for a quick chat :-D

Sophia & Elijah keeping order :-D

25th December 2016 - Merry Christmas!!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas!!

Bubbly to celebrate 

Thanks for all the pressies friends & family

We miss you all!!

X X X

24th December 2016

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas!!

Thinking of you all and

missing you very much!!

All our love

Jenny & Simone

X X X

21st December 2016

The weekend seemed to fly by,  Sunday was busy.  I had spring clean which seemed to take forever.  I changed the sheets, washed the floors, sorted clothes, did some washing and did some shopping  ..before I knew it, Simon was home  ..so not the most relaxing of days.

This week I've been out diving most days, doing clean ups, drupella snail collections and to today. Tomorrow is Reef Check, for Chinese  ..what's good is that our friend Han Song is running it, he's Chinese by the way and I'm going to be there for backup.  It's the first Chinese Intro that we've ever done, so it should be interesting :-D

Simon has been in the wars.  He hurt his knee on the boat yesterday, bashed it on something and its very bruised and this morning he twisted his ankle on the other leg  ..so he's hobbling around a bit.

He's not been sleeping well at all.  I often, well not that often wake in the middle of the night to find him on his laptop or watching something on his phone.  For the amount of sleep he gets, he does very well, I'd be so craggy  ...even more so :-D

It's nearly Christmas and it doesn't feel like it at all ...we've got our Christmas dinner tomorrow night. Lovely that we get 24 hrs notice :-D

16th December 2016

This week I've been mostly working with the Dive Master trainees  ..or should I say candidates  ..as that's what we have to call them now according to PADI

Monday I did a dive site clean up with only a couple of people and then on Tuesday I did a Reef Check Intro / full course.  Reef Check is a standardized monitoring method used worldwide to see how the coral reefs are doing, We not only monitor Coral but Fish and Invertebrates.  It's a great course and I do the Intro (day 1) with usually about 6 DMT's and then out of that, there is usually 1 or 2 people who sign up for the whole course.  This last week I've been teaching a lady called Janine who was a joy to teach as she was so enthusiastic about everything  ..too much at times but I can't knock her for that.   Han Song the chap on the right did the course last year with Kirsty our old flatmate.  He came along just to help out which was just lovely.

Celebratory beer with new Reef Checker Janine

Saturday for some odd reason I agreed to do 'Adopt A Coral' which meant diving in the afternoon on my day off.  It wasn't so bad a Simon agreed to come along and take photo's of the adopted coral being selected and then the transplantation onto 'Tilly the Turtle' structure.

Transplanting onto Tilly the Turtle

The chosen coral

7th December 2016

As I mentioned before the weather on Koh Tao has been horrendous.  It's been near enough non stop rain, thunder and lightening and for me, I've not had to go out as I took the weekend off but feeling a little penned in, I took a chance on Sunday afternoon where there was a break in the weather and wend for a cycle up to the resevoir.  The new road that they've just completed was looking a bit worse for wear, already cracks, drainage full and mud/and slides from where they've been clearing the land.  

Small section of the road

With the weather being so terrible, the majority of the ferries had been cancelled which meant that rather than catching the 6am ferry we could only leave the island on the 9.30am which meant that we'd miss our flights from Surrathani to Kuala Lumpa ;-(  In the end,  Simon scrambled around and booked alternate flights from Samui.

The journey across to Samui was rough but not too bad.  I think the 2 seasickness tablets that we took helped.  I was sat next to a little boy who puked all the way.  Not the nicest of things.  Off the ferry it was a quick minibus ride to the airport.  Samui was just as wet and flooded as Koh Tao.  Arriving at the airport we were eager to get checked in and chill but it was chaos.  Some domestic flights had been cancelled due to the weather, by the looks of things most international flights were still going out but trying to get information was a nightmare.  We took refuge and went to the Irish bar for a drink :-D   Flights slightly delayed we made it safe and sound to KL just in time for the last leg of our journey to Penang where we were met and taken to our lovely colonial accommodation.

Fortress

Scary cat!!

'Purfect cafe'   ..some of the unsociable cats

Simon enjoying taking a break from cycling ;-D

2nd December 2016

It's been raining all night and the forecast for the next week or so looks pretty grim. wind rain etc. You know when it's going to get bad as all the fishing boats moor up and take shelter in the bays.

We have to go on a visa run to Penang, Malaysia and with the weather at the moment, there have been a few ferry cancellations.  Fingers crossed they'll be running on Monday morning.

I've been quiet this last week. I only went out a couple of times with the DMT's, one day to deploy some old gym equipment (2 x crosstrainers) at our artificial reef Junkyard and then a Beach &Dive site clean up.

One chap found an old GoPro 3. He somehow managed to turn it on and downloaded 3Gb of pictures & video and then decided to find the owner, posting the pictures and asking his friends to repost his mail.

In just 7 hours, the owner was located.  She had lost it kayaking, 2 years ago and was over the moon.

I'm sure that brought some great holiday memories back.  Lovely story!!

Our amazing Advent calendar that was sent to us by my God Daughter, Iona :-D

Christmas countdown :-D