Big Blue Diving

Big Blue Diving opened in 1991 as the second dive shop on Koh Tao, founded by Michael Spjuth, a Swedish backpacker who returned to the island on a bank loan after finishing his own Open Water and most of a Divemaster course there in the late 1980s. Spjuth died in a motorbike accident on 1 January 2022; the shop's current premises, inside the Silver Sand Resort in Sairee Beach and opened later that year, are dedicated to his memory.

The fleet runs three boats: two purpose-built dive boats, MV Enzo and MV Waverunner, and a dedicated technical-diving boat, MV Big Blue, with shuttle boats moving divers from the beach to the main boats. Training starts on land, with an on-site pool for confined-water work before skills move offshore.

The course ladder runs on SSI, from a one-day Basic Scuba Diver try-dive through Open Water and Advanced to package deals covering Divemaster and Instructor; several individual instructors also teach PADI personally. Big Blue Pro, the shop's instructor-training arm, became Koh Tao's first SSI Instructor Training Center in 2004. A dedicated technical department, Big Blue Tech, adds sidemount, CCR, twinset, decompression, Nitrox, Trimix and wreck diving, and Big Blue Conservation runs marine-education programmes with an in-house marine biologist.

An in-house equipment technician maintains the gear, which the centre states was renewed to over 100 sets around the 2022 move. Long-tenured staff include Simon Garrity, an SSI Instructor Trainer at Big Blue since 2001, and Andy Campbell, who has managed Big Blue Tech for close to two decades.

Instructor quality is the theme divers keep coming back to, independently across every platform and over more than a decade: reviewers name specific instructors for attentive, safety-first teaching, community threads from 2015 through 2026 call the divemasters "second to none," and independent posts from 2010 and 2018 say much the same. Koh Tao's training volume shows up here too: some divers use the phrase "dive factory" for Big Blue specifically, but every account that does still rates the experience well, and several note that staff still group divers by matched ability. Equipment condition is the one open disagreement: a 2018 account called the gear worn down, while the centre describes it as renewed since the 2022 relocation. One review, not echoed elsewhere, described a guide over-managing an experienced group in a way that left an LGBTQIA+ group feeling unwelcome, even while praising the same guide's safety focus.