Call me Scuba Steve

One thing that Keiran seems to love more than anything in the world is Scuba diving. Like me he used to work in IT before leaving to travel the world and quickly discovered that diving was his passion and hopefully he can live life doing it all the time in future. All the talk of scuba diving became quite infectious as he talks about it with excitement that almost leaves you slightly jealous that you haven’t yet found something in the world that makes you that happy. With that being the case we decided to take a look into the available diving packages on the Island of Koh Rong off the coast of Cambodia.

I have personally never dived before and neither had Ursi but we both decided we wanted to give it a try, if only to get a taster of love that Keiran has for it. Unfortunately we couldn’t all dive together as Keiran is already qualified and so can do a fun dive straight away, however we did a discover scuba diving session so had a more instructor led session.

That morning we woke up nice an early and headed to reception to await our transport to the docks. One of our other room mates, a Swiss / Israeli girl called Noa happened to also be at reception as she was also heading to the Island to do some diving too. She was going to do the full certification course though so actually spent the first day doing theory so we didn’t end up diving with her either but still got to know her a bit better to hang out.

The group with Ursi and I also had a couple of Canadians in it who were pretty cool and we headed out to the bay of another island to do our confined dive and go over basic instructions. The confined dive is something that would normally be done in a swimming pool and is basically just going over the basics of how to replace our regulator and clear your mask etc. in case there are any issues. In the bay we were only about 2m down and the bottom was just normal sand with nothing really to see. It was good to learn the basics and get used to breathing underwater but not the most stunning of scenery. Towards the end of the first dive though we did get to go and see some corals and some quite large Jack fish that kept swimming beneath us without a care in the world.

After lunch we moved locations to a bigger reef that was also deeper for our second dive. From the moment we got in the water there was much more to see with all the coral reef and fish swimming about. The highlight of the dive was probably when we spotted a stingray under some rocks, although it managed to run away pretty quickly. When we later sound out that Keiran’s group managed to see a Sea Turtle we were just a little jealous but at least he got some pics and a video to show us.

All in all it was a pretty successful day and something that I certainly enjoyed and I think I picked a good place for my first time. Next time I get the change I may go for the 3 day certification course as then you can dive with a little more freedom but as they say, one step at a time!