Subject: Post: <p>I already completely recovered my flu a couple of days ago, but Iryna seems to be still a bit in progress. While she has been working and healing I did a bit different kind of diving today: My first dive on a rebreather unit instructed by the cave guy Mikko himself.</p><p></p><p>The normal open circuit diving in shallower than 40m depths is very simple, you just take a bottle of air with you and breath it via simple equipment with just a couple of moving mechanical parts. The rebreather units are a different story. You have only a small tank of normal air (or other gas mixes depending on depth) and a tank of oxygen with you, connected to a hightech system that washes out CO2 in chemical reaction, measures the leftover oxygen and adds just the right amount of oxygen back to the air for any depth. The air is not pushed to your mouth from a pressurized cylinder, but your own breathing circulates the air between your lungs and a counter-lung on the machine, through the processing system. That allows multiple hours long dives, unchanged buoyancy while breathing and silent dives due to no bubbles.</p><p></p><p>The predive checklists are long with testing the correct functionality of the system, breathing and buoyancy control feel very different and you have a dozen more buttons and computers to take care of. That requires pretty much learning to dive all over again, from the beginning. Although after an hour long dive I already started to get the idea and managed to handle the basics, and I even saw a turtle which Mikko missed. :)</p><p></p><p>Now just need to avoid getting addicted to rebreather diving, due to the machines being extremely expensive... It was fun though, definitely need to try again later on. </p><p></p><p>Tomorrow morning I should do two more dives with normal open-circuit tank for my navigation course and I think those will be the last dives for this time. Booked a Wednesday morning boat to Koh Samui and a one night hotel there, so then begins our journey towards home.</p><p></p><p>Koh Tao Divers had to sell their boat earlier to survive over corona, and that's why their operation has been very limited and kind of boring now. They only use the boats of other dive schools with a lot of other people on board and the boats usually only go to easy nearby dive sites due to beginner courses etc. That will be fixed soon, as Mikko today ordered a new boat for the company and it will be by far the coolest dive boat of the island, a brand new and very fast catamaran boat which can easily reach the faraway dive sites in short time. I think that means we need to return to the island when the boat has been delivered, maybe next winter for some weeks. :)</p> Latitude: Longitude: Security Code:
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