Day 70- I'm A Bigger Baby Than Colleen. There, I Admitted It.

As a general rule of thumb, I generally do not enjoy waking up early on vacation (or ever for that matter!).  I would have to make an adjustment to my usual practice of sleeping in until lunch time for the next few days, as Colleen and I were officially scuba students.  With that being said we packed up our homework and marched on over to Roctopus to begin our in-classroom training with our instructor Amber.  As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Colleen and I were the only students in our class as the Full Moon Party on the adjacent island of Koh Phangan had left Koh Tao in a rather quiet state for a couple of days.  The morning was spent with the two of us learning the basics in the classroom by watching videos and napping getting educated like the super students we are.  With the morning classroom work out of the way, we received our homework assignments for that evening and were given time to grab some lunch.  Yup, now all I needed was my parents' minivan and a bunch of my friends and it would feel like the year 2000 and high school lunches all over again.



Colleen is apparently not a fan of homework.



With our bellies amply full, it was now time for us to take the proverbial "plunge" and start actually practicing what we had been dreaming about for years a couple of days.  Normally the school we are with does all of their training right in the ocean, but because their boat was in the shop for the day, Amber would be teaching Colleen and I the basic skills in a swimming pool.  This was actually probably a blessing in disguise as Colleen and I are both wimps and  this minimized the risk of one of us quitting on the first day.  So, we got suited up and Amber spent the better part of her afternoon being overly patient with Colleen and I as she taught us some of the basics, such as breathing under water (fairly key I imagine!), mask retrieval and cleaning, regulator retrieval, etc.  The feeling of breathing under water was unlike anything I have ever experienced and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I had a couple of minor panic attacks on my first couple of attempts (this would be a sign of things to come in the days ahead).  Thankfully, I was only in a resort pool, so the odds of me drowning were greatly minimized.  We ended up making it through our first afternoon and ironically it was Colleen, the one who was SOOOO hesitant (see: scared) to try scuba diving who was actually the one who appeared more comfortable under the water.  The one downside of doing our training in the pool was the fact that the only wildlife we saw all afternoon was some baby wearing nothing but his birthday suit who kept bobbing in and out of the pool.  Look a baby sea snake!  Nope, definitely not a infantile sea snake.


This random dog won't judge me for being a pussy.

 Our evening was pretty uneventful as we were both wiped out from the first day of schooling either of us had been privy too in quite a few years.  We spent the night doing our homework and grabbing some dinner at one of the many local restaurants.  Tomorrow awaited, with our final classroom tests and some diving in the Gulf of Thailand!

~Brentski~