Celebrating at Sairee Cottage Diving
Here at Sairee Cottage Diving, we celebrated the Leap Year with pizzazz!! The sun is blazing hot in Koh Tao during February, so we have definitely been using our air condition in the dive shop and in our new classrooms. With High Season in full gear, heaps of travelers have visited Koh Tao, which means that our dive shop has been very lively and full of smiling faces because diving was so great during the whole month!
Our team of diving instructors was super busy teaching PADI and SSI diving courses (Open Water, Advanced, Deep and Nitrox Specialty courses, EFR/Stress and Rescue courses and new divemaster courses)! More importantly, we met some wickedly cool people from all over the world who came to Koh Tao to learn how to dive. We had guests from Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, and Serbia. Onca again, it was really cool to see how scuba diving unites people from all over the world.
New Divemasters in Koh Tao
This month, we added two more divemasters to the crew: Nikki and Victor. We are very excited to welcome them to the world of professional diving. And a huge congratulations goes out to Kirsten, or Shep, as we affectionately call her. She finished her PADI divemaster course this month and passed her ‘bucket’ test with flair! Stefan, Peter, and Ingrid have started teaching German to the rest of us non-German speakers; we, of course, have learned only the most important phases, e.g. I would like to order an alcoholic beverage and Let’s go diving!
Diving in Koh Tao
Diving around Koh Tao (or the Rock as we like to call it) is improving immensely. Rachel and her group of fun divers came across a GIGANTIC Great Barracuda in Buoyancy World at Twins. It literally was half the size of Rachel’s body, although every time she tells the story, the barracuda seems to get larger and larger! The Green Rock drop-off dive was stunning the last time Barry and Matt, his Advanced student, dove it.
[Sidenote: For all you nay-sayers, many grammatical experts accept that the word, ‘dove’, is a legitimate form for the past tense of the verb, ‘dive’. It is more commonly used in North America than by the British Commonwealth.]
…ANYWHO, Barry said that a school of Golden Trevallies took at least 8 minutes to swim by them; that’s a LOT of fish. The water was crystal clear with a deep blue tinge. Absolutely stunning! More recently, Paddy and his group of fun divers were ecstatic to see the Hawksbill Turtle at Red Rock while Sarah and her students saw some rare Nudy branches at the shipwreck, Sattakut 742.
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