7-7 Koh Tao Day 5

Our first of two dive sites today is the location where two whale sharks were seen just two days before. We had our hopes up, but the chances were slim. The Chumphon Pinnacle is located to the West of Koh Tao and is arguably the best dive site around the island. Chumphon is a series of pinnalces, much like the dive site from the the day before, but even more marine life is present. My specialty course for today is Deep Diving, which allows going on dives that exceed the Advanced Open Water limit of 100ft/30m and go as deep as 130ft/40m. Past 30m, the density of the air your breathe in is very high. The air feels thicker and breathing takes more work. At those pressures, the amount of dissolved nitrogen your body absorbs is very high. So high in fact, that it takes on a narcotic effect. The condition is known as Nitrogen Narcosis, but is also referred to as the rapture of the deep. I didn't feel much different at 40m and did well on several tests I had to perform. One of my other dive instructors had told me though, that years ago he got it bad, so bad that he thought he was watching TV down at 40m. He used his dive gauge as a channel changer and his dive buddy noticed it and brought him up several feet until it went away. Because we were doing such a deep dive, we used up a lot of our air and went to our no-decompression limit, as noted by the beeping of our dive computers. Past that point, you have to stay submerged at 5m for however long your dive computer says, which allows your body to remove nitrogen at pressure. We saw some beautiful fish and corals, but the highlight was a gigantic barracuda roaming around. It got within 5m and must have weighed 45 pounds! Unfortunately we didn't see any sharks. No one has yet to see one this year besides a few whale sharks. Another diver said that just three years ago he dove here and sat on the bottom, watching six black tips cruise around overhead. Now thanks to the shark finning industry, there are no more sharks. You can find shark fin soup in many eateries in SE Asia, mainly Chinese.
Our second dive was just off the Southwest coast called Shark Island. We saw all sorts of cool stuff and had a few close encounters with trigger fish, which are big, mean, and very happy to bite a chunk out of you if you intrude into their territory. By the afternoon I was officially a Rescue Diver, Nitrox certified, and Deep Dive certified. I caught a 5pm ferry to Chumphon, a large fishing port on the coast of Thailand. From there, I took a 12 hour ride on a bumpy bus to Bangkok. I hoped to be meeting with the rest of the guys in Luang Prabang, Laos the following evening.