Saturday 17th March
6am came around swiftly but I did feel that I’d had a solid
night’s sleep and felt refreshed. This
morning we had two more dives at the Similan Islands.
At 630am we jumped in at a site called North Point. A lovely
dive, we saw some tiny Pipefish that look like a cross between a seahorse and a
pipe-cleaner, a large barracuda, rare ocellated dwarf lionfish, lots of
Durban dancing shrimps and an anemone crab.
The dive finished along a channel between
some giant boulders with beautiful fan corals growing out of the sides.
After breakfast and a two-hour surface interval we were straight back in the sea at a site called Three
trees.
I’d been going through my air
more rapidly than I would like and wondered if it may be down to being
over-weighted, leading to me having to tweak my buoyancy too regularly. Another diving fact for you – the main aim of
any dive, after taking safety into account, is to try to maximise the amount of
time you can stay under to allow you to see more amazing life. Therefore, you
aim to breathe as slowly and shallowly as you possibly can, by using the bare
minimum of physical effort to float along as close to the reef as you can,
whilst trying not to touch anything or risk causing harm to any of the living
structure by bouncing off it. As soon as
you have to swim against a current or start hyper-ventilating because you’ve
seen your favourite underwater animal, you are using your air too quickly and
reducing your available dive time. By
reducing my weights and getting better buoyancy I was aiming to float along
weightlessly like a diving guru whilst also avoiding being too light and
pinging back up to the surface too rapidly.
Three trees was a great dive, one of my favourites here. We started on some pretty coral before
crossing a sand plateau covered with garden eels poking their heads out of the
substrate to suck in tasty plankton floating by:  |
| Each of those little heads poking out of the sand is a garden eel |
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| Varicose wart slug |
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| Impressive barrel sponges |
On the far side of the
plateau were further coral bommies with large shoals of trevally and snapper
floating around us and some incredible large fan corals (below). A truly stunning dive
and I felt much more comfortable being a little lighter.
 |
| Yellow snapper |
Over lunch the captain moved the boat for a couple of hours
to Koh Bon, meaning the island of the window. Rumour had it that divers saw a whale shark
here a few days ago, so expectations were set very high! As we had some extra
time we reviewed our nitrox questionnaires and took the exam. We thought that we’d be able to discuss the
answers, but Simon and I were given different papers because Kate didn’t trust
us not to cheat, so that idea went out the window! It ended up alright for me. I got 100%. What a girlie swat! But everyone
passed, so we could now relax for the rest of the trip in the knowledge that we
had gained a qualification.
On arrival at Koh Bon the first thing we noticed was the
increased number of dive boats compared to that on the Similan Islands. A reduced number of dive sites means that
everyone is more focussed in one area.
We did two good dives on the site called West Ridge. This consisted of an impressive wall that we
swam along to start with before reaching a pinnacle out towards the blue. At this stage we experienced some strong
currents, but once we rounded the corner of the pinnacle this dropped off and
we were able to appreciate the impressive number of fish on the reef. There were so many glass fish that sometimes
it was hard to see the reef through the cloud of fish! For example, it
made it hard to see one of the largest giant moray eels we’ve ever seen! We also saw our first banded sea snake.
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| A 'swarm' of glass fish covered the reef |
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| Moray eel tucked into the reef |
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| Spot the TWO stonefish.... |
The second dive began in the same way, swimming along the
wall but we stayed shallower as it was our fourth dive of the day, so we all
used normal air. One of the thing about this dive site was the very persistent
cleaner wrasse. They were
everywhere. I remember feeling confused
– what is that hitting my face? Ouch,
what’s wrong with my ear? Nothing, it
turned out, we were just being ‘cleaned’ as we passed the wrasse who thought we
needed a spa treatment and were being slightly too over-enthusiastic! We got to see a very rare species and one of the strangest
creatures I recall seeing, a Maldivian Sponge snail, no longer to be found
in the Maldives but enjoying living here. There was an area of the dive site which was
still badly damaged following the 2004 tsunami, but it was encouraging to find
that, despite it looking like a coral graveyard on first glance, there was
plenty of life there. Safety being of the utmost importance in diving,
especially when you are exposing your body to repetitive dives in a short time
frame, after each dive we conducted a safety stop, which is when you stay at a
depth of 5 metres for at least three minutes.
This is the ‘sweet spot’, the depth where your body can start pushing
out the extra nitrogen gas it has absorbed into your muscle tissue during the
dive. As an extra, extra precaution, we
did five minutes at five metres each time!
Most of the dives, if the visibility is good enough, you can still
either see the bottom or keep your eyes out in the blue to watch for
animals. But, just sometimes, it pays to
have a few things to keep you occupied whilst you float about and keep an eye
on your depth gauge - turns out our guide was an expert in creating 'air rings'.
We had done four dives in one day again, but tonight I felt
great. We were finished with diving for
the day before sunset this time, no more night diving. The boat moored in the
bay by the window and we got to see a shoal of fleeing flying fish and
even an eagle catching one before the sun disappeared below the horizon.
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| Sunset over the bow of the Manta V |
The earlier finish gave us the opportunity
for a couple of relaxing beers and to play some cards with our new dive buddies. There was a very mixed international
passenger list on board Manta Queen V.
Only one other Brit (who currently lives in Nepal), two Swedes, one
German, a Texan couple, two French guys, a Polish man and about seven Malaysians. We still had a full day of diving tomorrow
and another early start, so I didn’t want to push it. I went up to the sun deck to enjoy the stars
with the intention of sleeping out as some others had enjoyed the night
before. But the air conditioning units powering
the cabins below were turning over and it was far too noisy to sleep so we went
back to our cabin for our last night on board.
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