The weekend seemed to fly by,  Sunday was busy.  I had spring clean which seemed to take forever.  I changed the sheets, washed the floors, sorted clothes, did some washing and did some shopping  ..before I knew it, Simon was home  ..so not the most relaxing of days.

This week I’ve been out diving most days, doing clean ups, drupella snail collections and to today. Tomorrow is Reef Check, for Chinese  ..what’s good is that our friend Han Song is running it, he’s Chinese by the way and I’m going to be there for backup.  It’s the first Chinese Intro that we’ve ever done, so it should be interesting 😀
Simon has been in the wars.  He hurt his knee on the boat yesterday, bashed it on something and its very bruised and this morning he twisted his ankle on the other leg  ..so he’s hobbling around a bit.
He’s not been sleeping well at all.  I often, well not that often wake in the middle of the night to find him on his laptop or watching something on his phone.  For the amount of sleep he gets, he does very well, I’d be so craggy  …even more so 😀
It’s nearly Christmas and it doesn’t feel like it at all …we’ve got our Christmas dinner tomorrow night. Lovely that we get 24 hrs notice 😀

This week I’ve been mostly working with the Dive Master trainees  ..or should I say candidates  ..as that’s what we have to call them now according to PADI

Monday I did a dive site clean up with only a couple of people and then on Tuesday I did a Reef Check Intro / full course.  Reef Check is a standardised monitoring method used worldwide to see how the coral reefs are doing, We not only monitor Coral but Fish and Invertebrates.  It’s a great course and I do the Intro (day 1) with usually about 6 DMT’s and then out of that, there is usually 1 or 2 people who sign up for the whole course.  This last week I’ve been teaching a lady called Janine who was a joy to teach as she was so enthusiastic about everything  ..too much at times but I can’t knock her for that.   Han Song the chap on the right did the course last year with Kirsty our old flatmate.  He came along just to help out which was just lovely.

Saturday for some odd reason I agreed to do ‘Adopt A Coral’ which meant diving in the afternoon on my day off.  It wasn’t so bad a Simon agreed to come along and take photo’s of the adopted coral being selected and then the transplantation onto ‘Tilly the Turtle’ structure.

As I mentioned before the weather on Koh Tao has been horrendous.  It’s been near enough non stop rain, thunder and lightening and for me, I’ve not had to go out as I took the weekend off but feeling a little penned in, I took a chance on Sunday afternoon where there was a break in the weather and wend for a cycle up to the resevoir.  The new road that they’ve just completed was looking a bit worse for wear, already cracks, drainage full and mud/and slides from where they’ve been clearing the land.  

With the weather being so terrible, the majority of the ferries had been cancelled which meant that rather than catching the 6am ferry we could only leave the island on the 9.30am which meant that we’d miss our flights from Surrathani to Kuala Lumpa ;-(  In the end,  Simon scrambled around and booked alternate flights from Samui.

The journey across to Samui was rough but not too bad.  I think the 2 seasickness tablets that we took helped.  I was sat next to a little boy who puked all the way.  Not the nicest of things.  Off the ferry it was a quick minibus ride to the airport.  Samui was just as wet and flooded as Koh Tao.  Arriving at the airport we were eager to get checked in and chill but it was chaos.  Some domestic flights had been cancelled due to the weather, by the looks of things most international flights were still going out but trying to get information was a nightmare.  We took refuge and went to the Irish bar for a drink 😀   Flights slightly delayed we made it safe and sound to KL just in time for the last leg of our journey to Penang where we were met and taken to our lovely colonial accommodation.