Yet Another Dance Addict

While twiddling my thumbs in Khao Lak, waiting for the phone to start ringing and offers of freelance instructor or dive master work to flood in I needed to do some diving. There is no shortage of dive shops to choose from and basically three types of diving – day trips, liveaboards and hybrid platform trips.

• Day trips generally leave in the morning on a speed boat. They visit local dive sites around Khao Lak – like the Boonsung wreck, or more remote sites in the Similan Islands or Surin national park. There are usually two dives, one in the morning, a second in the afternoon. Lunch is provided in between the dives. The boat returns mid- to late-afternoon. Prices are around 3000-6000 baht including equipment and refreshments and depending on how remote the dive sites are.
• Liveaboards make multi-day trips with guests sleeping onboard overnight in varying degrees of comfort. Trips are anywhere from three to six days in duration. Shorter trips tend to concentrate on just the Similan islands, or just Surin national park. Longer trips are likely to include both areas. Prices start around 15000 baht for a three day trip including a two or four bunk shared cabin, meals and refreshments but excluding alcoholic drinks, national park fees and equipment rental. A three day trip usually includes 10 dives, a four day trip 14 dives, a five day trip 18 dives. They are intense.
• Platform trips are a combination using speed boats or longtails to deliver customers to a large boat which functions as a dive platform and may also function as a liveaboard.

I chose to do a four night, four day liveaboard trip with Big Blue Khao Lak. It was the first outing of the 2012/3 season for their new boat, M/V Hallelujah. And it was brilliant. Everything about it was brilliant – the boat, the accommodation, the catering, the crew, the staff and of course, the diving. We did 14 dives (three days of four dives per day, plus two dives on the last day); six in the Similan islands, two at Koh Bon, two at Koh Tachai, three at Richelieu Rock and one at the Boonsung wreck just off Khao Lak. I saw more lion fish on the first dive than I have seen on Koh Tao in over eight months, and more porcupine fish on one dive on Boonsung wreck than in all my previous dives combined. The visibility was generally excellent – often as much as 30m and the water so clear on some dives it felt like we were in an aquarium. We were inundated with lion fish, box fish, trumpet fish, cuttle fish, octopus, porcupine fish, box fish, trigger fish and moray eels. There were also plenty of nudibranchs for the macro lovers, a tiger tail seahorse, a peacock manta shrimp and a white tipped reef shark and a leopard shark. Sadly we didn’t see any manta rays (too early in the season for them) or whale sharks (but I’ve seen lots of them in Koh Tao recently).

Many people had told me how good the diving from Khao Lak was, how much better it was than the diving in Koh Tao. So I was expecting to be blown away and I was. Really there aren’t enough superlatives to describe how good this trip was.

Unfortunately I have no photos from the diving; I need an underwater housing for my camera or better still, a new camera and an underwater housing. Wonder what I’ll be buying myself for Christmas? In a way though, that was a good thing. It meant I got to spend more time looking at more critters than if I had been busy pointing a camera at a few of them trying to get the perfect shot.

Have you dived the Similans or Richelieu Rock? Have you dived anywhere you think is better? Tell me in the comments and maybe I’ll go there next year.