I met with Charlie, Tim, Andre, and a customer (Dave) at 8am inside Good Times Adventures. We walked to a nearby spot in a coconut farm to do some bouldering. Railay was a limestone cathedral, but this island is geologically nothing like it. Koh Tao was all granite with huge boulders, some as big as a house all over the place, from shore to the top of the highest point. Bouldering, simply put, is rock climbing without rope, which as a result keeps you from climbing much over 3 meters. You set crash pads under where you'll be climbing and someone will stand by to make sure your fall is contained within the pads. It's all about building strength and and skill by testing your limits, since the main purpose of bouldering is to practice your skills for rock climbing.
Making our way through the rows of palm trees, the wind picked up, making us a bit nervous. Just last week, two coconuts fell within a meter of Charlie while hiking here. Coconuts kill thousands each year, mainly those working in coconuts fields like this. After watching Tim and Charlie climb some routes on a large round boulder, it was my turn. In Railay, the limestone routes were well worn and smooth. Here, the rock was not smoothed, it was coarse granite. It was painful just to touch! I squeezed into a pair of climbing shoes, chalked my hands, and started a slow ascent up the boulder. With just 3m to climb, it's all about technique and practice on every single movement. At just 5ft off the ground, your friends/instructor can get right next to you and be very effective teachers. Due to the stone being so painfully rough, I had a harder time at first. The first climb was pretty easy, but the second was much more difficult for all of us. With all my strength, I barely made it through the second route without fail, using all my strength and will. My hands had three or four bleeding cuts and a nasty bleeding shin, all from the sharp rock. After a third route, I packed up and headed off to my 9:30am SCUBA class.
After 3 hours of reviewing homework and videos, we loaded the dive boat with 16 others and headed 20 minutes North to Mango Bay. Today is the first of 2 days training to go from an Advanced Open Water certification up to Rescue Diver. This training teaches divers how to recognize and react to stress, panic, and accidents underwater and on the surface. The underwater training ended up being pretty intense, but thankfully my two dive refresher course in Koh Phi Phi had my skills fresh in my mind. For the 'fun' part of the dive, we swam right into the middle of a massive school of fusileers....3 to 4 thousand strong! I swam right into the thick of them, then turned upwards toward the surface. As I swam upside-down, I could see the thousands of silvery bellies of the fish swimming overhead. We later found a soft sandy location in 5m of water to go through some basic drills. The area was packed to the gills with divers. There hade to be over 100 divers within a 300m radius. As my instructor "G" (short for Gwidian) demonstrated a controlled emergency ascent to the surface, I felt uneasy about our surroundings. He had a floating dive buoy depoloyed just 2m from us on the surface so the 7 or 8 dive boats knew to stay clear. As I sat on the bottom, watching G slowly rising towards the surface, my fears came true. The ocean became dark behind G as a dark shape blocked out the sun, making it's way towards him. He was looking down at me, so he didn't see the dark shape rapidly getting bigger and closing in on him. It wasn't a shark, it was almost worse. An 18m dive boat was cruising at 8 knots straight for him! I launched myself off of the bottom and jerked at his legs, pulling him back down. He saw me pointing, so turned an looked. The low booming hum of the boat's engine and propeller was deafaning. We both scrambled back down towards safety on the bottom with no time to spare. The boat's anchor dropped and drug through the soft sand towards us, so we scrambled out of the way- barely. It was a close call, to say the least! Had he not moved, he would have gotten a real nasty hair cut from that huge propellor. The boat was docking at a nice resort on shore and G knows the owner. Hopefully the owner will set him straight before someone gets killed.
We managed to complete the rest of our dive and moved to a second location called Japanese Gardens. It's a flat bottom with huge boulders covered in corals. The rescue diver course is turning out to be very physically and mentally challenging, even without the real-life rescues in the mix. It's just myself and two instructors, so by the end of the day at 5pm I was exhausted! By 10pm I had my fill of delicious massaman curry and fried shimp salad, but something was missing. It was 4th of July and I was in a foreign country with few Americans around. I was a bit homesick for fireworks and BBQ, not to mention it's my mom's birthday. As I cruised the street making my way home, something magic happened. From the beach on my right, a barrage of roman candle flares and small aerial fireworkds shot up into the sky. I was giddy like a school girl. On the beach I met a group of guys hovering around a pile of spent fireworks. Two guys were busy digging two big holes in the sand. Then I saw them, the most beautiful thing a man can see on the 4th of July: massively huge firework mortars! Two huge cylindrical bundles of joy, also known as commercial-grade firework mortars, sat in the sand. 10 inches in diameter and 30 inches tall, these babies were the focus of everyone's attention. The fuse on the first one was lit after it was securly buried halfway in the sand. Everyone scattered. From the c0ncussion of it going off, I knew it was the real deal. High above the beach and slightly over the water, a massive shell exploded, filling the dark sky with color, followed by that loud crackle. There was cheering, yelling, and jumping around all up and down our section of the beach. It was so fitting. What better way to celebrate US independance than to blow stuff up? There on the beach, I met back up with Jason and Ben, whom I'd met the previous morning at the port. We had a couple of beers at the most popular beach bar, but I couldn't stay up long since I had to dive the next morning. What a long, great day!
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