This is a collection of my blog entries and experiences with diving.
You can find all the pictures I've taken here, and read below for recountings of my more recent trips:
Finding a boat for Thailand was actually tricky, as they are many, and it was a little last minute for other reasons, but thankfully most boats were cheap and doing very short or short trips (2 to 5 days), which I avoid since they are not worth the time. In the process, I thankfully avoided a bunch of bad boats, some were overcrowded, some had untrained diving crew. Thankfully the boat I found that did 2 back to back trips, for a total of 10 days, was the Phinisi, and along with the Junk, one of the best boats in the area.
Sure enough, the crew was attentive, well trained, and cheerful. The diving groups were 4 to 5 people per divemaster, which is the best case scenario for the guides to be able to keep track of their divers and avoid a train of divers following a single guide. They also did a good job in making sure the different groups did not end up in the same place very often. All in all, outside of the boat being a bit smaller and less luxurious than the Waow, which was probably the best boat in the business by far, most everything else was more or less on the same level, which was awesome. For the addicts and people who did have to keep track of things back home during the 10 days, the boat didn't have satellite internet, but was within cell phone range once every 1.5 days at most, so that part wasn't too bad either.
Nice boat:
Here is our trip:
The views from the boat, from islands to sunsets, were spectacular, of course:
We went to land a couple of times, and one was unscheduled. Unfortunately Thailand has some amount of restrictions on when we were able to dive or which beaches we could set foot, on. The first stop was going back to port after an electrical problem prevented the compressors from working, making diving hard if you can't refill tanks. We missed one dive that day, but to the boat's credit, they got people lined up at night to come on the boat and fix the issue within hours of our arrival. During that time, we went to celebrate halloween in local bars on land, so it wasn't so bad :)
by random luck, I had my LED outfit with me, I don't normally bring it on dive boats :)
The second stop was Similan National Park, a nice 1.5H stop:
yeah, it was hard to carry that rock up there and balance it just right :)
Nice wildlife:
rare colorful pigeon
probably a water monitor
Anyway, we were there for divng :) Unfortunately this season was a bit unusual, and the amount of bigger critters was much lower than normal. We didn't get to see a single manta, shark, or more elusive whaleshark unfortunately. That said, there were still things to see:
plenty of small fishes
nice banded sea snake
nice manta shrimp, so colorful as always
cool fish :)
clown triggerfish are always fun :)
what a beautie
another unusual fish
the only sharks I saw, but they were cute and sleeping in a hole
fantastic camouflage
several cool caves
One really weird thing I saw on a safety stop, was this thing, with a small fish still alive, swimming inside its stomach:
The soft corals were pretty:
More pictures:
We had a 4 dives a day, including a daily dusk or night dive. I was able to use my new video light which had a cool blue/ultraviolet mode:
My favorite videos;
Dive Log:
Thanks to the crew for their hard work, and I hope to be able to come back in the future (apparently April would have higher odds of nice critters):
