Scuba

Getting certified

I did my Open Water on Koh Lanta, Thailand in 2007 during my first trip to Asia. I loved it. A year later I was back, and from that point things escalated fast - Advanced Open Water on Tioman in Malaysia, then Rescue Diver on Koh Tao at a dive school called Asia Divers. I did both with very little time in between. My brother came along for the Tioman part and did his Open Water while I did the Advanced. We shared the dives we could.

The Rescue Diver course on Koh Tao turned out to be more important than I realized. Asia Divers, and the people around it, became the center of my social life for the next several years. I also first met my wife there, though we barely said more than hello.

Divemaster

I started my Divemaster training on Koh Tao in late 2008. The DMT on Koh Tao was a thing - basically a long internship where you dive constantly, help with courses, and generally spend your days in the water. It's like the college years but for diving. I finished in February 2009 and did my 100th dive shortly before that - naked, of course, as is tradition. The DMT graduation ceremony on Koh Tao is called a "Snorkel test", and it's when you and some of your fellow graduates wear a mask with a snorkel, that snorkel has a funnel. Into that funnel goes a bunch of alcohol. I made sure not to get crazy drunk like a lot of people do for this often-fun event.

Instructor

I did my IDC (instructor course) in November 2009 and started working. I was a freelance instructor to begin with - being Norwegian and speaking German made me a reasonably interesting candidate, and I did courses in Norwegian, Swedish, and German in addition to English. I also got my SSI instructor certification.

Eventually I joined New Way Diving as a pool instructor, meaning I was in the group of instructors that did most of the work, and the total earnings were split between us. It was hard work, and there was a lot of it. By the end I didn't enjoy diving anymore, and I enjoyed teaching even less. My last 6 months on the island I went back to freelancing.

Final count: just over 300 PADI certifications plus a few dozen with SSI. Everything from Bubblemaker (kids' intro) to Divemaster. I was a PADI MSDT at the end. Technically I qualified as a Staff Instructor, but I never sent in the paperwork.

The good stuff underwater

I like macro - nudibranch, ghost pipefish, frogfish, the small stuff that many divers never notice. I'm pretty good at finding it. Octopus are a favorite. Highly intelligent, incredible vision, and the camouflage is genuinely hard to believe until you see it happen.

But the big encounters are what stay with you. On Koh Tao, on the way back from a morning dive, we spotted whales - most likely Bryde's whales. The boat stopped and I had my snorkeling gear on in record time. I was first in the water and I was *fast*. I got to maybe 5 meters away before I stopped completely, only then realizing how big they were. They felt like the size of a bus. Two adults and one calf.

I saw whale sharks probably more than 20 times during my years on Koh Tao. Got very close to one a couple of times. I had a manta ray encounter on Koh Lanta where I was close enough to touch it (I didn't). I've been about 2 meters from a bull shark on Koh Tao - roughly 3 meters long, very large and beefy. I have a photo of myself lying on the bottom next to a leopard shark on Koh Lanta. Lots of turtles. Various smaller sharks.

Dive trips

My wife and I traveled during the Koh Tao monsoon season most years. Koh Lanta right after I became an instructor, Pulau Weh in Indonesia the year after, Bali the year after that. The Pulau Weh trip is where I did the deepest dive of my life at 47.5 meters. Beautiful island, incredible diving. I also did some solo dives occasionally - an incredible feeling of freedom, though I always stayed shallow with direct access to the surface.

I also did some freediving while living on Koh Tao. Static breath hold of 3 minutes was my record. Deepest freedive was about 20 meters.

After

We left Koh Tao in 2012 and I didn't dive again for 12 years. My next dive was on Koh Lanta in 2024 during our family backpacking trip. We did a few dives on Bali too. Turns out you don't really forget how to breathe.