Ger’s Excellent Adventures

I met my friend Jeremy in Phuket, Thailand for a 6-day liveaboard scuba diving trip around the Similan Islands, one of the world’s best dive sites. My daily expenses were about ten times what they were in Vietnam, but it was well worth it.

A few hours before our trip left we learned that the rest of the boat had been booked by a group from Denmark, 11 of the 14 spots available on the boat. I was initially worried that this might result in a lame trip depending on the nature of the group (we could get stuck with a boring family or something) but then cheered myself up with the possibility of it being a group of Danish supermodels.

When the shuttle arrived to pick us up, in my haste to meet the supermodels I left my guitar back at the dive shop :( For weeks I had been looking forward to having tons of spare time to play while sitting on top of the boat, so I was pretty bummed about that.

It turned out to be a group from a Danish dive club, not supermodels (but a couple were pretty cute), and they ended up being a good group to dive with. I was happy to have experienced divers on board (in addition to having a more experienced dive buddy), because I wanted to focus on diving this week. It was going to be a busy week of diving, 22 dives in 6 days, and I was still a novice diver — I had only done 16 dives before this trip, all of them over 14 months ago in Australia.

In between dives Jeremy and I both took a course on using enriched air (a.k.a. nitrox), which is air with more than 21% oxygen; ours typically had about 32%. Enriched air lets you dive longer because it reduces the amount of nitrogen that builds up in your body, which normally restricts your dive times for safety/health reasons. I also upgraded my PADI certification level from Adventure to Advanced. Both these things meant we had to spend a bit of time studying and take some written tests while on board. (we passed with flying carpets, as Ricky would say.)

Anyway, on to the diving: it was pretty amazing. There were only a couple dives that I found mediocre, the rest were excellent. I think if you made a list of the top 20 dive sites in Thailand, we must have covered at least 10 of them. We saw a huge whale shark, manta rays, leopard sharks, some amazing schools of fish and some of the most lush reef life I have ever seen.

I think the highlight for me were three dives we did at Richelieu Rock, which is an underwater photographer’s dream come true. It’s got it all — big stuff, small stuff, massive schools of fish, tons of macro life, endless carpets of anemone. I would have been happy to have spent days diving that one site.

One thing that really blew me away was watching huge schools of fish swim and turn in unison: it was like they had choreographed everything in advance. I can’t figure out how they do it — they’re too quick and well-timed to be simply following each other, so I guess they’re all just reacting to the same stimuli or something. Actually, I don’t want to know how they do it, because right now it seems like magic. It’s the kind of thing that would have made my mouth drop open if I didn’t need to breathe through it to live.

Another super cool thing was watching this shape-shifting, color-changing octopus: check out how he parks himself next to a rock, then turns into one himself. Swimming around with this manta ray was fun too. They’re pretty friendly unless you start chasing them around.

I stuck to my plan to focus on diving this week: took good care of myself, drank lots of water, got lots of sleep, learned a lot about diving (including learning how to breathe, which you might think I should have known already), and ended up a much more experienced diver than when I began the week. I did the most dives I ever have in one day (5), my most in one week (22), my deepest dive (31.5m, 103 feet), my longest dive (60 mins), and a bunch of other stuff I had never done before like swim-throughs, caves and ascending a chimney, and swimming in currents.

And I took a few underwater photos: about 785 of them, of which I kept about 280, the best 60 or so may be worth looking at.

(I would have posted this entry much sooner but I got distracted with adding support for video files to my photo gallery software.)

After this trip we headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we plan to spend a few days not diving before continuing on to dive Sipadan, another of the best sites in the world.

More photos in the Similan Islands, Thailand…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 4:24 pm UTC and is filed under Asia '06-07, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.