Goodbye Koh Tao

Ok, sorry for the delay but it's hard to write something when you don't know what is really going on but now, for better or worse I have made a decision, committed to it and officially begun to panic and second guess.... Well, not really. I am laughing at the way life plays these tricks on me though.
First, a quick recap. I was on Koh Tao for 3 months. I think I did pretty well on the health front since I was one of the few people in that time that didn't have to take any time off diving due to health problems like ear infections, motorbike accidents and other random (usually infected) injuries. It probably was a tapeworm that I had because I took some worm pills and feel much better now.
Back in mid-May I arrived on the island with mom and dad as and Open Water diver with 7 dives and had planned to stay for a couple days to do my Advanced Open Water course before moving on. 3 months later mom and dad are at home and I'm a Divemaster with 145 dives. It probably could've been even more but there was a long stretch of bad weather in there that sucked the motivation out of a lot of us. You might think that over 100 dives on a handful of dive sites would get boring but I've found it to be the opposite actually. This past week or so has been amazing weather and conditions and was my favourite diving of all of it. Even on my last day of diving I was still "discovering" new fish. Sharks, Cobia (they look like sharks and actually scared the fun diver I was with so much that he hid behind me so I'd get eaten first), a close encounter with a turtle (I hope to get that photo up on Facebook soon), my deep dive to 40m and a bunch of other random great stuff. So yes I am sad to be leaving. I think it'll actually be really strange to not be wet all the time and to actually have to wear something on my feet again.
On my penultimate day I was also reminded how dangerous diving can be too. An Advanced student on their first deep dive panicked and bolted to the surface from 27m taking the instuctor and DMT (good friend of mine) with them. The instructor and student were fine later but I never saw the DMT again and rumour had it that he was in decompression....
I extended my departure by one day because on the night I was planning to leave originally there was a staff pool party in celebration of the Business Excellence award the resort got from PADI. What a great way to end my time there, tossing everyone into the pool after an amazing buffet.
Ok, I know you only read all that because you want to know what I am doing now. Currently I am in Krabi again relaxing for a couple of days. I will then make my way back down to Singapore where I have enrolled in a course called "Assistant Life Support Technician" which will start at the end of this month. It's a 2 week course as most of the training is done on the job. After a long period of training you can then write the exams to become a full LST. LSTs are the guys that monitor commercial saturation divers and generally keep them alive and doing their jobs. It involves a lot of physics, physiology and dive theory but I think it will be interesting. At least I can put some of my science background into use again. After that course I will take another in Offshore Safety (not sure how I'll pay for that yet...) and try to land a job on an offshore oilrig or somewhere else crazy and try to rake in the big bucks. I'll need a little luck and the world economy to keep improving but I think I can pull it off. At least it should involve travel and something other than a 9 to 5 job. You know I couldn't handle that now....
Ammon