My Scuba dive at Thailand and info about places to dive in india

Hi,

I was thinking about writing this from long time, now i got a little bit time so here it is. I did scuba diving first time this year at Pattaya, Thailand alng with my brother. We booked a diving tour from padi instructor. It cost us some 4000 bhat[nearly Rs 6000] for 2 person [each 2 Dive]. They picked us from our stay next morning around 9 AM.

Some 30 minute later we were at the diving location already decided by our tour operator. There they told us about some theory about how to dive and what are the symbols we use underwater. What we will be doing there they some practice out side about balancing the pressure underwater. Yes this is very imp. i can tell from my experience, As one need to balance the water pressure with the body through ears and if one has cold please don't dive. I know how painful it can be if you are not able to balance the pressure (will tell you how that can be). We were five to dive that day 1 Dive instructor ,2 Dive buddies and we 2 brothers. Two dives were already planned for 45 minutes each. At first dive we learnt how to tell your dive buddy about oxygen outage,how to clean water from the eye glass, how to throw water out of mouth without removing the gas supply and use of the symbols. This dive was gr8 in overall learning and experiencing the underwater world.

For next dive we plan to just enjoy the sea life during full dive period. So no more learning only enjoyment. We didn't carry our digital camera on this dive as we were having a normal digicam and we were not sure how to carry it underwater [Later when we were doing some shopping we saw some plastic covers for digicam :( ]. Anyway we asked our tour operaor about clicking the images underwater trust me that doesn't worth because those image were so blur and low quality that i can't post those images here. Anyway we went for the dive with keeping in mind that atleast we should enjoy the dive. And here things started to get messy for me because my dive buddy was quiet novice and he took me down very fast, so fast that i wasn't able to balance the pressure and it was a great pain in my brain vains. anyway my dive instructor was quiet experienced that he figured out that something is wrong and he came behind us and took me up carefully and later he carried my dive buddy also :) . Anyway this wasn't that scary as it seems overall the dive was worthy and i would like to go again for diving. So i started searching where i can do diving in india. So here are some of the places in india where one can dive.

Goa [barracudadiving.com]
Netrani Island, Karnataka (near Goa) [ one can book dive from goa for netarni]
Lakshadweep [lacadives.com]
Andaman Nikobar [diveindia.com & diveandamans.com]

As i heard from people diving in Goa is not much great exp. as water is not clear but i heard there is a shipwreck which i feel will be pleasent to see. Along with that netrani and pigeon island also might be good places to dive. check this link http://www.barracudadiving.com/courses.htm for cost of the courses. I never had and discussion about lakshadweep and andaman scuba diving but i feel those should be much costly and much exciting than the goa's scuba diving.
Some important things before you go for scuba diving
1. Never dive alone
2. Don't touch anything underwater untill your dive instructor tells you to do so.
3. Don't dive if you have cold, going through heavy medication, have recently faced surgery, just came from a flight or about to catch one.

Virat