Again, many apologies for my lack of posting but the flood waters have been rising here in Bangkok which resulted in me heading for the dryer lands of the South for 10 days to try to escape the creeping, typhoid laden wall of water that was slowly approaching my home and workplace. Now that I'm back in Bangkok (and the water seems to have stopped a few blocks away from my neighbourhood) I am able to post a little Koh Tao dive briefing to wet (no pun intended) you appetites!
One of my favorite views - watching the sea, beer in hand -
Haad Sairee, Koh Tao
Ahhh Koh Tao! As I said in an earlier post Koh Tao is where I learned to dive and ever since has snuggled down and taken up residence in a happy little corner of my heart. Cute, cosy and chocked full of buckets, beautiful bodies and beaches - Koh Tao is one of my favorite places in Thailand. Conveniently, it's also home to some great and easily accessible diving! Because I had just returned from diving in Bali and had not really budgeted for another diving adventure, I had to curb my appetite and only pop under the waves few times. The self-denial was difficult but I managed to survive. I got down for three days of diving in total.
The first day I had a morning dive at a site called " Hin Peewee" It was my first dive of the trip and set the bar a little low...on the visibility side that is. Due to some wierd tides and the runoff from an early morning rainstorm the visibility was about...uh...25cm. Ya, total brown out. We ended up aborting the dive after 20 minutes simply because we couldn't see anything at all. Although completely annoying and not even remotely interesting I don't mind doing a dive like this every once in a while because it keeps me on my toes and reminds me of how good I usually have it! - admitedly I don't particularly like paying for it!
Dive fun-o-meter: 1
Interesting-stuff-I-saw-o-meter: 0 - does sediment count? What about the tank of the person next to me...oh wait, I couldn't even see that.
Dive #2 was much better. After a change of sites to "Red Rock and Nang Yuan caves" and a 1.5 hour surface interval the vis has cleared and we were back up to about 18meters vis. This is a wicked dive site that decends onto a big underwater "rock" with a horizontal crack running along the center at about 12meters which is home to lovely little critters such as Jaan's pipefish, nudibranches and banded cleaner shrimp.
While we were snooping through the crack we heard the unmistakable "ping" of a tank which only means one thing...something cool!! So we shallowed up a bit and came face to face with a big fat hawksbill turtle grazing away and looking grumpy as they tend to do. After realizing that we were there only to gawk and ruining his lunch he took his leave and so did we. The rest of the dive was through the Nang Yuan caves which is a series of connected swim throughs rather than caves. All in all it was a good dive with lots of fishies and more :)
Dive fun-o-meter: 8
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 8 - yay turtle! Yay pipefish!
Pipefishy face!
The next day we did two dives again the first at South West Pinnacles, the second at Shark Island.
Dive #1 - S.W Pinnacles is an open ocean site consisting of a series of pinnacles starting at about 8 meters and decending down to about 30 meters. It was an early dive and we were lucky to be the only ones at the site. We spent our dive cruising with giant groupers (these were whoppers! Definitely dinner for 10..or more), schools of jacks and trevallies, stingrays and bat fish. The best part of the dive was shallowing up to about 8 meters surrounded by literally thousands on baby damsel fish swirling and schooling around us. It was like a damselfish blizzard but it was warm and my eyelashes didn't freeze off!
Dive fun-o-meter: 8
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 7 - Damsel fish blizzard!
Damselfish!!
Dive:2 - Shark Island...unfortunately there are no sharks here, just looks like a shark fin sticking out of the water :(
This was a cool site with lots of small stuff. Urchin clingfish, sergeant fish, nudis galore and cute little baby cuttlefish. Unfortunately there was also a lot of rubish on this site. I don't know if it was the tides or the location or what but I spent a lot of the dive stuffing the pockets of my BCD full of plastic bags floating in the water. Another cool thing about this site is there is an underwater grave of a man who loved diving and asked to have his ashes buried there. Kinda a wierd thing to come across but cool none the less.
Dive fun-o-meter: 7
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 6 - the plastic bags but a bit of a downer on the whole experience.
My final day of diving was a full day trip to the famous "Sail Rock". Big Blue Diving (the dive shop I dive with in K.Tao) runs a weekly day trip out there. It takes about 2.5 hours to get to but is well worth the trip. We do 2 dives at Sail Rock and then hit S.W Pinnacles on the way home. What makes Sail Rock so cool is the "chimney". It's a big cylindrical swimthrough that runs vertically from 6 meters to about 18 meters. You can do your intial decent down the chimney popping out of a hole at the bottom or can do it the other way around. Super Cool tube of diving fun!
Me at Sail Rock!!!
Dive 1 and 2 were pretty similar since they were on the same site. We were told there was a whale shark at the site the day before but alas he or she did not decide to come visit us :( We did see tons of batfish, longface emperor fish, porcupine fishes, angel fish, snappers and fun nudibranches. On the first dive we popped out of the chimney onto a school of tiny baby yellow tailed barracuda! They were only about the size of my index finger. Awww so cute! We also had a visit with a big fat momma moray eel that had to be at least a meter long if not more and had a face off with a couple of very cranky titan trigger fish. All in all, both dives were delightful! Yay Sail Rock. I heart you!!!!
Dive fun-o-meter: 9
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 8 - cute baby barracuda!
Dive #3 - S.W Pinnacles.
I would like to rename this dive the "airsucker super express" since we were diving at 27 meters is wicked heavy currrent which meant that we all huffed up all our air quicker than usual. The dive was a bit short (40mins) but we saw lots of cool stuff. Probably the wierdest thing was a rabbit fish that had a full bite taken out of its back - just like out of a cartoon. He was still swimming along with this fishy buddies but I have a feeling his days were numbered....poor little bunny.
Beware of injured rabbitfish.
So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. I escaped the murky floodwaters of Bangkok for the fish filled Gulf of Thailand. Upon my return I found my house still dry and everything in the general vicinity to be as it was when I left it. Here's hoping it stays that way.
Stay tuned for my Koh Tao dive briefing - the dry land edition!!
Cheers from the fishbowl and remember to leave me a comment on my Blue Season Bali Best Dive Job application site by clicking HERE, scrolling to the bottom of the page and telling Blue Season Bali why I deserve to win!!!
J
P.S Once again, I can't take pics underwater so thank you to google images for allowing me to steal other people's pictures.
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