Kieran Hooley, is 31 years of age yet carries with him the wisdom of a man with twice as many. Perhaps it is the half foot long rust red beard that he keeps, earning him the nickname “Beard” to the locals on his island home of Koh Tao, perhaps it is the clear eyes of a person that spends half their life submerged in ten or more meters of sea water, or perhaps it is simply the way a man who has had the good fortune of finding his life’s purpose and passion at a young age always comes across when asked to speak about their life. Either way, there is an quality about Beard that puts others at ease the moment they are in his presence—a perfect quality for a dive instructor.

Originally from Huddersfield, Great Britain, Beard found himself on the small island of Koh Tao when he was 22 traveling with a group of friends:

“We were traveling around Thailand—had a big plan for Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. We planned two years of traveling and then three weeks into that plan we came to Koh Tao. I did the open water [scuba diving] course and that’s when the plan stopped—I have never left.”

“I was probably the worst student my instructor ever had. [They] taught me from open water all the way through to instructor, so obviously we got quite close, and she would laugh and say, ‘I can’t believe you are now a dive instructor.’ We would think about the times in the open water course where I had to spend an extra day in the pool to get up to the same level [as the other people in the course]. I had lots of problems—I wasn’t a water person. That was nine years ago, I was 22. You get to a point though when you feel as comfortable on land as you do underwater. That might sound like a really strange thing— for a non-diver they wouldn’t really be able to understand it.”

It was sometime in between Beard’s initial open water scuba diver training and becoming an instructor that he experienced the most remarkable moment of his life. A smile spreads across his face at the thought of it, the sound of the waves fills the pause in his speech as the memory washes back over him:

“The first whale shark that I saw… it was an out of body experience. We heard that it was at the dive site—Hin Wong Pinnacle—which is at the other side of the island. That was the only place where it was really flat and calm, but the visibility was still quite bad. We’d heard that there was a whale shark there so obviously we were excited—super excited… We’d done the entire dive—the dive was going on, going on, going on and we hadn’t seen it and I was so disappointed. Then, we were doing the safety stop and the instructor pointed… I looked and couldn’t see anything. I could just see this dark big shadow—like a silhouette… but then I recognized that it was moving and eventually as it was getting closer, I could see the spots and see the mouth and it was just—wow. So big.”

“When we came up, I remember saying to the instructor, ‘Oh my god that was huge.’ The Instructor said, ‘Yeah, and it was a baby.’ He said it was around three to four meters and I was like, ‘That was a baby?’ Obviously since then I’ve seen ones that are like six or seven meters long and they’re just giants but they’re so slow. They are so majestic. It’s almost like they’re not even swimming. It’s crazy. Every time you see one it is amazing but that first time you see one underwater—yeah, it is magical.”