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Published: February 9th 2009
Well I never thought I’d be able to say this but I have just completed my 'PADI Open Water Diver Course' and it was brilliant! I've spent the last four days doing it here in Koh Lanta with Palm Beach Divers and they were really great. I was lucky enough to have a private course with an instructor all to myself as it was pretty quite when I enquired.
For those of you (like me a week ago) who don't know what this means, it means that I can now dive anywhere in the world down to 18m deep with another person (like a diving buddy). The course itself is broken up into 4 days, with 4 tests, two confined water dives (which I actually did of the beach in the shallow water) and then 4 ocean dives. Basically days 3 & 4 are spent out on the boat diving on reefs in nearby islands. The third day you go down to 12m deep and the last day is 18m. I had heard the diving was really good in Koh Lanta so I thought I take the opportunity to do it whilst I was here.
One of the highlights
was diving on the last day about 300m away from Phi Phi Island were they filmed the move 'The Beach'. It was an amazing little reef and I saw lots of fish everywhere and I have no idea what most of them were. The other good thing was that the visibility was about 15-20m so you could also see a long way.
Having never really done anything like this before I was a little apprehensive at the start (mainly due to a lack of info/knowledge I had about diving). But once my instructor talked me through everything and got me used to breathing under water it was all pretty straight forward from there.
One thing I can recommend if you ever get the chance is doing the course solo. This way you get so much more time one on one with your instructor and you really get to fine tune your skills. As you can imagine when your in a group with 2 or 3 other people you simply don't get the same amount of attention.
I've attached a few pictures from the last day. Sorry I didn't get more pictures but its a bit hard to
take shot of yourself (especially underwater) when your doing a diving course!.
Cheers, Scuba Dog
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Jules
non-member comment
Under water Doggie!
Hi Bro, Just got your diving licence in the mail today! Looking sharp I might add! Can take pictures! We will bring it over with us so you can show it off to all your hot sweedish chicky babes. Show us some photos of your amazing tan soon...... Loving the blogs. Little dog x