New Year's in Thailand: Scuba Diving

Yuliya and I were picked up early by the dive van and headed to Patong to pick up our guide and the other divers.

Patong beach:

We saw two elephants along the way:

We then drove another 20 minutes to the pier to get on our boat at Chalong pier. The boats were docked right next to each other so we had to walk through two other boats to get to ours.

Yuliya and I walking onto the first boat:

From our boat we could see the Big Buddha at the top of the hill:

Here we are getting our briefings:

Our diving guide showing us a map of our two dive sites.

Wheelhouse:

Snacks on the 90 minute ride:

We arrived at Raya Yai island (Yai means big, there is also Raya Noi, Noi means small) at the diving sites at Bungalow bay. Due to the wind, this was one of the smoother areas to dive in, so there were a lot of other boats there.

We put our equipment on and stepped off the boat.

For the first dive we held onto a line to go down. We deflated our vests in order to achieve neutral bouyancy, where we were neither floating nor sinking. We were popping our ears regularly in order to equalize the pressure.

The first few seconds were challenging, since my instinct was not to go deep down into to the water and breathe, but I got used to it fairly quickly. We dived for about 45 minutes and saw many interesting fish and coral. We were about 40 feet down.

We went back to the surface slowly and waited for our boat to pick us up. We had a great lunch and a break and then got ready for our second dive. Here's the second dive location:

More underwater stills from the video:

Here's our boat picking us up:

On the second dive, Yuliya and I were much better at controlling our depth with our breathing (you hold your breath to float up and hold an exhale to sink down).

After getting back to the pier, we took this bus to our van.