Thursday 15th March – The return to Phuket and boarding the Manta Queen V

An ornate sculpture in the hotel lobby

Our schedule was not too harsh for today. We took a 10am transfer from our lovely hotel to Chiang Mai airport. We were really early for our 1pm flight so spent some time drinking coffee and playing cards.  The flight with Air Asia was very comfortable and we were even treated with extra legroom that we hadn’t even requested.  They must have just looked up at Simon on check-in and thought he’d be needing it.  We’ll definitely be travelling with them again in future if we get the chance!

  

We landed in Phuket (for the second time this trip).  We were in good time to be able to get something to eat before our pick-up between 4 and 430pm.  Or so we thought.  We experienced some really bad service at an airport chain of Amazon Café and ended up keeping the rest of our minibus waiting until 415pm! At least they didn’t leave without us.  We were then transferred to Khao Lak, the home of KSA (Khao Lak Scuba Adventure) who were our tour operators for our liveaboard adventure.  It took over an hour to reach Khao Lak where we were welcomed by the dive crew who would be living with us for the next 72 hours.  

Khao Lak Scuba Adventures

At check-in we met Kate from Belarus, who turned out to be our dive guide for the whole trip.  We were offered the opportunity, at a cost, of taking our nitrox course whilst on the liveaboard.  I’ll try to explain as briefly as possible what this means.  Diving means breathing air under pressure.  Normal air consists of only 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen (plus a few other gases in a negligible amount) and when breathed under pressure, nitrogen dissolves into the body’s tissues.  The deeper you go and the longer you dive for increases your risk of nitrogen narcosis, or poisoning, which can cause you to do some dangerous things under water.  In the 1990s after years of testing, enriched air, called nitrox, was introduced to the diving community.  This is a gas mix which contains a higher percentage of oxygen, between 21 and 40% in some cases, the main benefit being to reduce a diver’s exposure to nitrogen thereby decreasing the risk of side effects and allowing divers to stay at greater depths for longer.  It is also meant to leave you feeling brighter, in contrast to diving on normal air which leaves you feeling very drained after two or three dives.  We will be doing 11 dives in three days, a demanding schedule, therefore we were convinced to give nitrox a try and signed up for the course.  Plus, it is always a benefit to gain new skills and we are finding that increasingly dive centres are offering nitrox as an option, or even their preferred option, due to the safety benefits.

Having signed our lives away, taken full responsibility if we choose to kill ourselves and paid for the privilege, we were fully kitted out for the trip.  Then, we waited.  We were told that there were fifteen divers on our boat, the Manta Queen V, that has the capacity to house 22 divers.  Good news, we should not be too cramped during our trip.  But waiting for everyone to arrive and get kitted out took a lot longer than we imagined.  And the mosquitoes around the dive centre were like ninjas!  I was looking forward to being out of their range on the ocean.

Our cosy cabin

Eventually, all of us, our personal belongings and a ton of dive equipment were loaded onto a big truck and we were driven, it has to be said at break-neck speed, down to the pier to board our home for the next three days, the Manta Queen V.  It was gone 8pm by this time.  Once on board we were well looked after, the staff loading all our bags onto the boat for us.  Then, we were introduced to the six Thai crew on board who live permanently on the boat for the seven-month-long season. There was the captain, his back-up/engineer, two boat boys who would assist all the divers with their equipment, the cook and her assistant.  Them, plus the fifteen divers and five dive guides gave us the total number of passengers for the trip.  We were allocated our cabins and shown to our abodes (right).  Pretty cosy! But, we were pleased to find that they were not only air-conditioned but we also each had a power socket, light and individual fan over our heads for comfort in the humidity.  

 

It was a long process and there was a lot of information to take on board for the trip. By the end of it all I felt drained even though we hadn’t really done that much during the day.  We were given a light dinner and informed that the captain would be taking us out onto the ocean, for four to five hours into the night to reach our destination, the Similan Islands.  The schedule for the first day was posted on a board, along with our dive groups.  We would be woken at 7am to be jumping in for our first dive after a site-specific briefing at 730am.  A serious business this diving malarkey.  But you’ve got to get up early to get as much time in the water as you can if you want to see the good stuff!  Can’t wait.  Time to insert ear plugs to block out the sound of the engine and generator and see how much rest we can get on our solid plastic mattresses and pillows.