Barracuda

I learned to dive in Thailand in 2002 while staying at a place called Naithon, on the west coast of Phuket. My friend, Paul Lambert, persuaded me to sign up, along with him, for a diving course with Aqua Divers, a school run by Rainer Gottwald, a Slovenian-German, and Jens Hofacker, also German. The only non-German-speaking staff member, besides the Thai divemasters and boat boys, was Denis, a Francophone from Switzerland. It was handy that Denis didn't speak German because then the other guys had to speak English to communicate with him, as none of them spoke French. Of course, Paul and I, like most Aussies, are monolingual.
We ended up doing both the PADI and CMAS courses: the former at Aquadivers Naiyang, north of where we were staying and the site of Phuket's airport, and the latter at the Naithon branch. The Naiyang branch was destroyed in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Just off the coast in this area there is a little island with a coral reef that provides some great dives. It was whilst diving there in April 2004 with DM Boris (another Frenchman, from Grenoble) that I had the marvelous experience of being followed by a school of barracuda.
I hadn't taken up underwater photography at that stage so I painted a barracuda instead.