Our last day of the course involved an early start to be able to get to the dive site before the crowds. We met at the dive shop for 7am and assembled the equipment, and met our videographer who would be filming our last 2 dives of the course. So, all looking a bit tired and bleary eyed we boarded the small taxi boat that would take us to the larger boat.Once on we travelled the 40 minutes, through fairly bumpy waters to our first dive site of the day 'Chumphon Pinnacles'; it would be our deepest dive yet at 18 metres and would also let us see much more sea life than we had done to date. As we descended down the rope and the daylight began to fade we entered a magical world, swimming with blue spotted stingray, grouper, angelfish, barracuda, trigger fish and white eyed eel to name a few. We were down for approx 40 minutes which gave us ample time to swim around the 3 pinnacles and explore. Back up on the surface we had a tough swim back to the boat and probably the toughest climb back up to date as the waves were crashing quite hard against the side of the boat were we had to climb the ladder (with all our equipment on!).
Dive number 2 was 40 minutes back to Koh Tao and on the north west corner called 'White Rock', this is where we had to fool around for the camera...and instead of doing our usual step in off the boat we had to stand on the edge and fall backwards. Then on the bottom a number of games ensued (also for the video), which was all good fun. Back on the boat we travelled back to the dive shop and were then told the final hurdle in becoming fully qualified divers was to sit an exam...an exam...neither of us had sat one of those for many years!! So, back at the bungalow we swotted up before heading back to the dive shop at 5:30 for our test. Needless to say we both passed with flying colours and have all the certification to say we are qualified divers!!
We celebrated with the other people on our course with a couple of beers.
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