Swimming with the (Big) Fishies

The morning started off with a reminder of how small this world is. Yesterday, I came over to scuba dive on Koh Tao because I was getting tired of laying on a beautiful beach, getting massages, and eating gourmet food. Wouldn't you?

After arriving on the island, I hopped on the back of some guy's pick-up truck, and ended up at Ban's, the biggest dive shop in the entire world. (Koh Tao is so popular because the waters are crystal clear and the diving is the cheapest in the world.) Having spent the last 10 years breathing without a machine hooked on my back, the shop thankfully made me take a short refresher course. I say its a small world because my instructor went to the same high school as my girlfriend and many of my U of M friends. I-banking? Consulting? Medicine? No way....a New Trier education will allow you to land one of the sweetest jobs in the world--a dive instructor in Thailand!

This afternnoon, a Dutch guy, two Brits and I were led on two 45-minute dives by an Austrian dive master. (This whole trip feels like being a delegate at the United Nations.) The highlight of both dives was swimming within several yards of grey reef sharks. (The picture of the grey reef shark on the right is from a website--since my Casio doesn't work underwater--but it does show exactly how far away the sharks were.) The sharks, perhaps a dozen, were about 7 to 8 feet long. Swimming with the sharks, all I could think about was Police Chief Martin Brody, Amity Island circa 1975, and a certain movie by Steven Spielberg...