Amazing Diving
Trip Start
Aug 15, 2006
1
119
155
Trip End
May 27, 2008
Ko Similan,
Thailand
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Early morning saw the arrival of 5 new shipmates - 4 Canadians and another dive instructor, Sean. The rest of the day was spent diving, reading about night diving, learning to play backgammon, eating the Hershey's chocolate we'd bought, swimming in the sea and jumping off the top of the boat (very scary!). I did get dragged into the task of drawing a dive site map, with all the main features and locations of fish, which turned out to be good fun and I got quite carried away drawing all kinds of fish (although it still looked like a 3 year old had drawn it!). That evening we went down for my first ever night dive which was amazing! Unfortunately my torch stopped working but my kind buddy Ollie let me have his and I tried my best to point it in a direction so he could see where he was going too
Army ship
. We saw some surreal things including a morray eel the size of a shark and a weird mollusc creature that not even the dive crew could identify. That night I had a lot of pain in my stomach and felt very nauseous and threw up (all over the sink, blocking it which probably didn't impress the boat staff!). I felt pretty horrendous and was extremely concerned I wouldn't be able to dive for quite some time.
I had to miss the early morning dive and tried to catch up on lost sleep and fluid. I managed to keep down some bread and decided to take up the offer of going off the boat in the small tender and exploring the beach and cliffs of Donald Duck Bay (so called because the rock at the top of the cliff supposedly looks like him). I was starting to improve and decided to try and go for the second dive of the day which paid off as we saw manta rays! Still feeling somewhat grotty I ate what I could so I was well enough to keep diving.
On Tuesday we were due to dive at the well-known site of Richeleu rock, however there was a strong current in the water, and since we'd already almost lost one perosn due to this, the skipper decided we couldn't go and had to dive around the same site as the previous day. We did see more manta rays, I finally saw octopi so I was happy and we even saw some leopard sharks which was a rareity! We went off the boat again but this time to Koh Bon island, a new place that isn't quite open yet since they were still building some huts for accommodation
The main deck
. The guys working there took us to see a big crab and had a pet bat we could hold. The boys all played football and I had fun on a big swing on the beach and then headed into the sea for some beach volleyball. It was paradise! That night it was Ou's (a dive master) birthday so we had a little celebration and the crew had made her a cake out of a stack of pancakes (I passed though as I still wasn't 100%).
Today the weather still wasn't good enough to go to the other dive sites so we stopped off at Boomsunng wreck on our way back to shore as an alternative. It was actually pretty interesting, despite the poor vis due to sand disturbance and we saw a many deadly scorpionfish (very well campoflagued) and a huge school of cuttlefish; something I'd always wanted to see!
Back on shore we collected our bags from the office, said our goodbyes and waited outside a cafe to flag down a bus heading north. We got a bus to Chumpon and since Ollie called a guesthouse in advance to reserve our room, he persuaded them to collect us from the bus station. The only problem was that they came on two motorbikes and it was quite a challenge to get on with our daysacks on our front and huge backbacks on our backs, but we managed it and got a cheap room for 160baht.
Tonight we checked out train times for tomorrow as we plan to head to Kanchanburri, home of the bridge over the river Kwai and got some street food.
