Monday was an early start, we had to check out at 7:30 to catch the 8:30 ferry to Koh Tao. As soon as we arrived we headed to our diving school to fill in paper work then headed to our accommodation for check in at 12. We had some quick lunch then headed back to our dive school at 13:00 for our first lesson! We spent the afternoon completing module 1&2 of our theory with Mariana our Portuguese instructor, which consisted of watching videos and completing a quiz/test after, we also did a practical learning how to set up our equipment, we finished at 18:00 and headed to 7/11 for diner. Luckily quite a few people we met in Koh Phangan are also heading to Koh Tao in the next couple of days, tonight Davy and Laura came to our place and we watched a film at our accommodations restaurant.

Tuesday we had to be up early to start our diving lesson at 8, we spent the morning completing module 3&4 of our theory then at 12 we got on the boat and headed to a dive site named Japanese Gardens to complete our confined dive. We spent 4 hours in the water at 5m and had to complete lots of dive skills, such as, taking our regulator out and finding it again, filling our masks with water and blowing the air out with our noses, taking the mask off completely then putting them back on and blowing the water out, dropping our weights, buoyancy skills, emergency skills etc. All were fine except Laura really struggled with taking the mask off as she kept snorting the water!! Took quite a few goes until she learnt to forget her noes completely, quite a transformation for someone who holds their nose in the bath!! Whilst kneeling on the sea bed there was lots of little fish swimming around, some called Cleaner Wrasse (same family as the spa fish) were nibbling the dead skin from our legs. It was a long tiring day and we were glad to be back at the accommodation to rest.

Wednesday we started our lesson at 9 and completed module 5 of our theory. At 12 we got on the boat and headed back to Japanese Gardens to complete a few more skills. After we did our first 2 open water dives which were amazing! It was so cool being down at 12m right next to all the colourful coral and fish. When we got back to our accommodation Laura noticed a animal poo on the floor so instantly looked round for a mouse or rat, when she looked up there was a geko the size of a flip flop on the roof!! Our accommodation were very helpful and covered up the hole it went out of with cardboard. We decided to meet up with Laura, Davy and George to go to the Koh Tao Bar Crawl however they sold out of tickets so we decided to do our own version and had such a fun night, ending it off by drunk haggling a women for friendship brackets and anklets!! We got so carried away having fun we forgot to save money for a taxi home so it was a long 30 mins back to our accommodation...woops!

Thursday it was a struggle to wake, we started at 9 to complete our final Exam, we managed to complete it only getting 3 out of 50 questions wrong! At 12 we got on the boat and headed to a dive site called White Rock to complete our 3rd open water dive and practice some underwater navigation skills, during this dive we got down to 17.9 metres! After, the boat took us to our 4th open water dive at a dive site called Pottery where we saw a Blue spotted Ray and a white eyed moray eal, Parrotfish, Fusilier and Hexagon Grouper. We headed back to the dive centre and completed our log books which made us officially qualified as Padi Open Water Divers!! In the evening we met back up with Davy and Laura for our final night together before they head back to Scotland so we went for dinner and had a few drinks watching a fire show on the beach, reminiscing all the fun we had and how we are definitely having a reunion at St Patrick in Ireland!

Friday we had a lovely lie in followed by a big full English! We caught the boat at 12 to head off on our fun dives, first we went to a dive site called Twin Peaks where we saw lots of rainbow fish, angel fish and longfin banner fish. There was a nice sand section where we stood on the floor and practiced blowing air rings, doing somersaults and swimming through hoops which was really fun. After, we went to the dive site called White Rock and continued having lots of fun. We headed back at 16:30 and had a hour break before going off on the boat again for a night dive at a dive site called Tao Tong. It was 18:30 when we jumped into the water so we had some very powerful torches to take down into the water with us, unfortunately all the colourful fish sleep during the night but there are certain fish that are more lively. We saw a blue spotted sting Ray out hunting, flat worm and feather starfish. We were back and kit washed by 20:00 and we were so tired so had a quick 7/11 tea then bed!

Saturday we had to be up early as our boat left at 6:45 for another 2 fun dives. We headed out to Chumphon Pinnacle which is the furthest dive site from Koh Tao so the most likely site to see Whale Sharks however today we are suffering the tail end of Typhoon Hagupit so the sea was incredibly wavy, Laura was beyond scared so they had her sat behind captains cabin where she couldn't see! The dive master decided it was too wavy so the boat turnt back and we went to White Rock again which looking back is disappointing as we both really wanted to dive with a whale shark however at the time Laura was very relieved. We had another good dive seeing the same fish as before including a Giant Grouper. After, we headed to our second dive site called Hin Pee Wee, we luckily got to drop right next to the Wreck HTMS Sattakut and had good enough visibility to see the top of it, we could not dive further to it as it is beyond our 18 metre limit. We got back to the dive centre at 12 so managed to spend the rest of the day relaxing and packing our stuff as tomorrow we leave to head north with a quick stop off in Bangkok.