Learning to dive on Koh Tao with Below Zero Divers

Koh Tao is one of the cheapest and best places on the planet to put a regulator in your mouth for the first time. More than 25 dive sites around one small island, water that stays warm all year, and on a good day visibility that makes you forget you are five metres down. Turtles, parrotfish, barracuda, and now and then a whale shark that ruins every dive you do afterwards.

Below Zero Divers is the school we send people to. It is small on purpose, the kit is new, and they take the safety part seriously without making the whole day feel like an exam.

Never dived before

A try dive is the low-commitment way in. You get the basics and the safety rules on land, then you go in with an instructor next to you the whole time. No certification, no course, no decision to make. It is there to answer one question: do you like being under water or not.

Plenty of people book a try dive and then extend their stay on Koh Tao by five days. Consider yourself warned.

Getting your PADI Open Water

Koh Tao certifies more divers than almost anywhere on earth, and with Below Zero it takes three days. You start with theory and skills in shallow water, then do your open water dives around the island.

Over the course you:

• build up confidence underwater one step at a time
• do four open water dives on different sites
• learn to move properly instead of flapping
• work out how to dive safely with a buddy
• end up qualified to 18 metres

After that you are a certified PADI Open Water Diver. The card does not expire and it is valid everywhere, so when you carry on to Indonesia or the Philippines you can walk into any shop and join the fun dives.

Fun dives and going further

Already certified? Then you join the fun dives to sites like Chumphon Pinnacle, Sail Rock, Southwest Pinnacle and Shark Island. Which one you get depends on the weather, the current, the visibility and the level of the group, so nobody can promise you a specific site.

If you have two spare days, the Advanced Open Water is worth it: five dives including a deep dive and usually a navigation, wreck or night dive, and it takes you to 30 metres. Several of the better sites in Indonesia and the Philippines ask for that card. Get properly hooked and you can keep going here through Rescue, specialties and eventually divemaster.

Not been in the water for a while? A refresher gets your skills back before you join a normal dive. Tell them when you last dived and how many dives you have and they will work out where to start you.

What you actually see down there

You dive along reefs, rock formations and deeper pinnacles where big schools of fish stack up. Parrotfish, triggerfish, moray eels, rays, barracuda and turtles. It changes day to day, which is the whole point of diving the same island twice.

And then there is the one everyone on Koh Tao is quietly hoping for. Whale sharks turn up at Chumphon Pinnacle, Sail Rock and Southwest Pinnacle often enough that it is a real possibility and rarely enough that nobody can sell it to you. If one comes out of the blue while you are down there, that is the dive you will still be describing to people ten years later.

Why we send people here

Koh Tao has dozens of dive schools and you can absolutely get certified cheaper. We do not pick on price, we pick on who is standing next to you at six metres.

Below Zero keeps groups small deliberately. You are not a number in a class of eight, you learn at your own pace, and a skill that does not click gets another go instead of a shrug. That is the thing that decides whether you finish your course feeling like a diver or like someone who survived a course.

The school is young, under a year old, and has already collected more than a hundred five star reviews. Everything being new also means the gear is new, including wings rather than old jacket-style BCDs: the air sits on your back, so you hang horizontal in the water instead of bobbing about upright.

And the atmosphere is right. You get to know the instructors and divemasters, you are on the boat together, and you end up in the same bar afterwards telling the same story. Serious about safety, relaxed about everything else. What you remember later is not only the turtles and the sites, it is the people you did your first dives with.

Good to know: say in your first message how many people you are and when you want to start. It is a small school, so a course is a person’s diary rather than a slot in a system, and walking in on the day is a worse plan here than it is at the big outfits on the beach road.

Discount with REBELSONTHEROAD

Diving with Below Zero? Mention the code REBELSONTHEROAD in your very first message and the 5% reader discount gets taken off your price. Nobody applies it for you afterwards, so say it up front.

It works on the multi-day courses, so Open Water, Advanced Open Water, Rescue and everything after that. It does not apply to single fun dives, try dives or refreshers.

Already certified? Tell them your highest certification, how many dives you have logged and when you last dived. That way they can put you on the right dives with the right amount of hand-holding.

How many days should you actually put aside for Koh Tao?

More than you think. The Open Water takes three days, and almost nobody does three days and leaves.

What happens is this: you finish the course, you are suddenly a diver, and the only thing you want to know is when the next boat goes out. If you have one day spare, that becomes two fun dives. If you have two, people start talking you into the Advanced. Book your onward ferry loosely.

And if you are on the fence about diving at all, do the try dive. It costs an afternoon, it commits you to nothing, and it answers the question far better than reading about it does.