When it came to my next scuba experience it was almost three years later when I was traveling through South East Asia with my older brother Justin who was already a certified padi open water diver. We were staying on an island called kho Tao in the gulf of Thailand. We had already been on the island for some considerable time just enjoying the laid back Thai way of life, lounging around on beaches and taking in the local culture and food.

Kho Tao is the smallest of the three islands in the gulf and predominantly known to be a dive island with over 30 dive resorts at the time. One afternoon we were lying on the beach when a boat pulled up full of divers, my brother asked me if I would be interested in going for a dive and of course I was.

This was to be a dramatically different experience to the last one, 28 degrees Celsius in the ocean as compared to 7 degrees in Portland, proper equipment that fitted and professional instruction through the padi system. I knew that I was going to enjoy it so I signed up for the open water course and started on the academics straight away.

I read the entire open water manual that day and completed all knowledge reviews ready for the lessons that would follow the next day.

When I arrived at the dive shop I met my instructor, who was an Israeli man taking a break from doing his national service with the Israeli army. His style of teaching was excellent, very military, but I was used to that after spending 5 years as an army cadet.

The boat we were to be diving from was a thirty meter live aboard anchored just of the island. Following the classroom sessions we took a small long tail tender out to the boat to start the practical part of the course, ie, equipment setup and confined water training. After we had finished setting up our equipment he started to give me the pre dive briefing. His briefing very thorough and he made me feel very comfortable about what we were about to do. Anything compared to my last experience was going to be a breeze.

We took a giant stride of the back step of the boat into water which was about 5 meters or 15 feet deep and very clear. We were at the site known as Kho Nan Guan or The Japanese Gardens, known as such for the extensive and very beautiful coral reef waiting below.

We swam on our backs, on the surface into the beach area where we would start our confined water session. This was an exceptional place, the only place in the world where three separate islands are linked by one sand bar. A Very different site to Portland sound!

Once under water, he began to demonstrate the essential skills needed to be able to dive in open water, which I found very easy, so we moved through the first three sessions very quickly. We then swam under water through the Japanese Gardens gradually getting down to our maximum depth of twelve meters or forty feet. It was an incredible experience compared to the last one, and I knew just after this one session what my new passion in life was going to be.

I completed the course and then both myself and Justin signed up together to take the advanced course, but both of us now sharing the same passion for diving decided to take it all the way and signed up for the dive master internship. This also meant that we would have to stay on beautiful kho Tao for at least another six to eight weeks.

We both found the work for all the courses to be very interesting but not that challenging, even the stamina and fitness training came easy to both of us as we had been competing in amature Thai and freestyle kickboxing training for the past 4 years and had attended many international and national level competitions and even competed in the world championships in Cheltenham England.

We were by now at the last week or two of our internship when the owner of the dive shop and head instructor approached us with the offer of staying on to run the live aboard dive operation as the main dive masters. We were both delighted with this offer and later found out that this had been there plan from the very beginning and they had been training us not only as standard dive masters but training us to run that specific operation.

We stayed on the island as working dive masters for the next year or so, notching up many dives to our credit and assisting in a lot of courses from open water right through to dive master, which I found to be more satisfying than just leading dives and from that point on I knew that I was meant to be an instructor.

I started to enquire about what it would take for me to become an instructor, other than the tremendous cost, and found that I would have to wait a minimum of six months from open water before enrolling in an instructor development course. We were also told by another older but very experienced dive master that we should not even consider taking the course until we had at least over a thousand dives to our credit. I thought at the time that this was very excessive but now I can really understand why.

Trying to teach someone about something you yourself have only been learning for less than two years just doesn’t make sense. How can anyone teach people how to dive in all conditions, if they have yet to experience this for themselves? I know this is wandering from the point, but one of my pet hates as an instructor is seeing people going from open water to instructor in eight months and hearing them teach about diving in strong currents and extreme conditions when the have only ever dived in swimming pool conditions such as the Caribbean or gulf of Thailand. I guess that kind of attitude comes with the experience of dealing with the problems that can arise.

Justin and I stayed in Thailand for another six months diving every day and loving every minute of it.