A Familiar Old Dive

When we moved to Singapore a little over a year ago I declared that I wanted to get certified (again) for scuba diving.  The diving in Southeast Asia is wonderful and while no one else in our family wanted to get certified, I know we have friends coming to visit that are divers and I wanted to be able to enjoy diving with them.

I grew up in a Southern California beach town and got my original PADI certification in a PE class in the mid-70’s.  With some other friends—Rick, Jeff, and Jim, we dove for 3 or 4 years on the beaches of Laguna Beach with an occasional Catalina Island trip.  The last time I dived was before I met Julie and that was almost 38 years ago.  Rather than try to get my c-card reissued I thought it best to start from scratch.

I did a lot of looking around trying to find the best option for me.  And while Singapore had a couple of locations that provided pool instruction for Ocean Water Diver certification, the required ocean dives meant a weekend trip to Malaysia and it just sounded too grueling to me.  I started looking at destination options and landed on Super Divers in Phuket.

Why them?  First off Phuket was on our places to visit and since my birthday bumped up to the long Easter weekend we thought it would be a good get away (don’t worry, Julie and Christopher had a good time exploring while I was learning).  Secondly, Super Divers was VERY HIGHLY RATED on both TripAdvisor and Google.  I contacted them by email with several questions, all of which were answered completely and promptly.  I decided to go with them and paid in advance via a PayPal link they sent me.  Note that their refund policy is OUTSTANDING – right up to late the day before you are supposed to start.

I was picked up at my hotel on time by a car and dropped off at the Prince Edouard resort where we did our classroom and pool training.  Besides me, there was another young couple from Hong Kong—so the total group was 3 which meant very focused attention from the instructor. 



Dive Instructor Mike

Our instructor was Mike (aka Texas Mike—but don’t hold the Texas part against him).  He was patient, knowledgeable, and had a lot of different ways to approach training if the first way didn’t work.  On top of that, he was a nice guy.  And if you are going to spend 3 days with someone it REALLY helps if they are enjoyable to be around.

Classroom training has come a long way in 40+ years because of technology.  First off the courses done via video with great follow-up by Mike to make sure the key concepts were fully understood, not just memorized.  Second is what technology has done to diving.  The last time a lot of time was spent on how to use dive tables—now a dive computer on your wrist will do that for you (and better).  The last time I was certified you spent time practicing buddy breathing—now you have a auxiliary regulator to help another diver.  And your Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) is attached to you air tank to make using it much simpler.

The pool training was fun.  It had been a long time since I had donned my scuba gear and gone under.  It also came back to me fairly well.  Clearing a mask, buoyancy control, and communicating with hand signals.  I don’t think I will ever forget the mental of image of Mike pointing to his head to mean “think before you do it”.  After the third or fourth time of doing a skill wrong (or more likely too fast) he was pointing to his head so hard I was worried that he would puncture his skull.  But it was all done with safety in mind—now, or more likely sometime in the future when Mike wasn’t around to remind you.  And that’s what I wanted.

Pier Trucks

On Board the Pier Tricks

The second day I was picked up at the Palms Resort and Hotel a little earlier by a mini-bus for the ~1 hour drive (with other pickups) to the Chalong Pier to meet up with Texas Mike and get on the dive boat.  The pier is quite long and there are trucks that shuttle you back and forth—it’s a little chaotic, but that’s part of the charm of Asia.  The boat had about 50 divers onboard and almost all were with a dive instructor or dive guide.  This made the chaos much more manageable.  There was no shortage of the food onboard, breakfast, lunch, drinks, fruit—all you could need or want.

We chugged about 2 hours out to the Racha Islands for our three training dives.  In 2010 an extended period of warm (hot?) water bleached the coral, basically killing it all.  There were fish around, as well as white coral (with some beginnings of rebirth) so there was stuff to see.  There was also a sandy bottom, which was great for learning and testing.   Mike put us all through our paces and we learned and demonstrated many diving skills in our three dives.  At the end of the first day I think we felt good—sometimes a little frustrated, but we knew we were learning it the right way.

The next day pick up was a little earlier.  This time it was a different boat from Chalong Pier (the same chaos) and we headed out to the Phi Phi Islands (a three-hour trip each way).  After the first dive of the day we had demonstrated and passed everything—we were certified Open Water Divers.  That meant the next two dives were more about polishing our skills and enjoying diving, I ended up back at my hotel about 8:15 pm, a long but rewarding day.

So now I am a (re)certified diver.  I plan on diving again with Super Divers and Mike, next time with our friend Lisa when we head to Phuket with a group of American friends.  Next year it will be somewhere still to be determined with Peter and Trish, college friends.  So I am happy that I did it the way I did it with the instructor I got—no regrets in any way.