Scuba anyone?
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I'm going to be diving for the first time next month in Thailand. Doing the PADI Open Water course and possibly Advanced too, depending on how much time I have.
If anyone has dived in Thailand before, can you provide any recommendations for place to take these courses? As it stands I'm thinking Koh Lanta, as I only have two weeks in the country and it's location lines up with the rest of my itinerary, but I'm open to other suggestions.
Did my PADI Open Water there about 30 yrs ago. On Koh Tao, but the diving is much better in the Andaman Sea (where I went later, around Rai Leh, beautiful reefs and some wrecks) than in the Gulf. Agree with Giles, just do the OW and dive as much as you can.
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No experience of diving in Thailand I am afraid. But my strong recommendation is do your open water, then enjoy diving for a while. Then add advanced (and Nitrox if you think you will dive a lot) at a later date.
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to have roughly five days on the island, so this will probably suit me much better than trying to cram two courses into my short time there.
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My normal computer locked out for some reason a couple of days ago. I was not diving with it at the time, but nevertheless, when a dive computer locks out, it will not work for 24 or 48 hours. So I used my spare dive computer, which I am not used to. When Haid, the divemaster and I set it to Nitrox, we added a few other safety warnings, including deep stop. My spare is different from my primary, so I was not used to what it was telling me. I did not notice that I went into deco, but did see a 14 meter deep stop warning come up. I was cold and it was the last dive of the holiday, so thought, oh fuck it, the warning has only come on because we programmed it to be super-cautious and even if the computer locks because I ignore it, then it does not matter as I will not be using it again for months…...
Got to the normal 5m safety stop and did not believe the computer was telling me I had to do a 31 minute stop. So I timed 3 minutes with my normal watch, checked that Paula who I was diving with, had zero safety stop time left, and surfaced.
My computer was erroring so I showing to Haid. So he basically made me do the 31 minutes, not that I was arguing. I just felt really sorry for him, as hanging around for half an hour under the surface when you are cold is not a lot of fun and for Paula who was on the boat not really knowing what the hell was happening.......
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My max depth was 1.3M deeper than hers, and she deep-stopped at 14M for 1 min. I think on balance, I would have been fine, but if anything had happened to me, it probably would have been the end of Haid's diving career….
…and you might have spend the last day of your holiday in a decompression chamber.
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Glad you’re ok G and I hope Paula is too. Is this incident worse that the regulator one from the previous trip for her mentally or is she joking about it now and you guys can have a laugh?
I think she was only slightly worried about me. The crew of the dive boat took it in their stride and fed her tea and fruit.
I was actually pretty knackered last night and went to bed super early, but feel fine today. The regulator incident was a major learning - and now laughing - experience…
Neither will scar us for life, but both in their own ways, will make us better divers. I spent the whole of dinner last night analysing what went wrong and how I could have avoided it, in the end I had to promise to shut the fuck up
