Diving in the Similan Islands

We didn't get much sleep the night before we left for diving as the room was incredibly hot. We've been saving money by not getting air-conditioning, but recently we had been in quite a lot of places with small wall-mounted fans instead of big ceiling fans, which was making me think twice about it. I woke up quite unhappy from lack of sleep, and very anxious about the diving. This was top-end diving and I was a relative rookie diver, with only about 35 dives under my belt. I hadn't enjoyed the diving in Cambodia, and I was still not convinced that diving was “my thing”. I still wanted to dive for Joanne's sake, who was thankfully feeling much better, but I was actually feeling irrationally scared. Just lack of sleep I think, but now I really was not looking forward to it.

The minibus picked us up early at the hotel, and we discovered the two others we were joining are quite senior UN personnel, who talked incessantly on the way to the port. I had hoped to get some more sleep on the journey so I now became even more unhappy, and now had the additional worry that we would also not fit in socially: everyone on the boat would be high-flyers and realise that we were just faking it. We were backpackers at the moment for goodness' sake, what were we doing getting into something like this? It would be us and the rich and famous! When we arrived at the port, Jeff and Catherine introduced themselves properly and Jeff was happy to join me in the urgent search for coffee, which immediately made me warm to him. At least I had something in common with these people. We were expecting to miss one dive on this, the second day of everyone else's trip, but it took a long time for the speed boat to get organised, and Jeff began to complain that he wanted to get at least one dive in today. The most dives I had previously attempted in one day was three, which Joanne had found quite tiring, but this trip was intensive: four dives a day. Jeff and Catherine had originally been scheduled to go on a trip that day, but it had overbooked, so the dive companies had got together and cobbled together an arrangement whereby one company would speedboat them out to their live-aboard with their group, and another company would dinghy them (now us, too) from that boat onto the one they would be diving from.

The speedboat was horrible. The sea was quite choppy and Jeff, who seemed to know something about speedboats, reckoned that the captain had not a clue how to use the something-or-other [I can't remember what]. Most people half-fell asleep not long after getting on the boat, and most of the rest just looked green and unhappy. Joanne was in the latter group, complaining that she felt terrible and couldn't take any more. As far as sickness goes, I actually felt fine, but I have not suffered from motion sickness at all really since I was a child. The only problem I was having was that every time the driver judged the whotsname wrong, we took off from the crest of one wave and crashed down onto the next one. These things must have impressively strong hulls, however my back is not so well designed and it every time this happened I could feel my vertebrae crushing closer together. After over an hour of this, the captain said called over one of the dive masters, who announced to the group that we were not able to go on because they had just received word from the live-aboard that the wind and the waves was terrible where we were heading, so the captain had decided we could not risk it. The speedboat turned around and started heading back to land. I wondered what would happen to the plan. At least we hadn't paid anything yet, I thought, but then I realised that I was also feeling very disappointed and that I had been sitting there on the speedboat getting used to the idea of the trip, and actually starting to look forward to it. Joanne told us later that, at this point, she had thought “hooray, dry land, let's go back!”. But then a miracle happened, or at least something rather unexpected: the captain turned the boat around again and started heading back towards open sea. “The captain has decided to risk it after all since we're so close, but we might need to go a bit slower” said the dive master.

After a total of over 90 minutes of thump-thump-thump against the waves we got to the live-aboard, which was floating near a small rocky island. The South Siam was quite a big boat, already full of people in various stages of wetsuitedness. Someone barked orders at the new arrivals (except people for the Colona, he said) to quickly write their name there get their gear there get ready there blah blah blah. I was starting to become a bit anxious again; would I be able to remember how to put my kit together, especially if we're expected to work that fast. After ten minutes or so a dinghy buzzed over from a nearby boat, which I noticed was called the Colona. The four of us were herded into the dinghy, but it was really quite difficult to get into the thing. The roughness of the sea had not been particularly noticeable on the big South Siam, and when we made the difficult transition onto the Colona Joanne complained that she was feeling sea-sick again because the Colona was small enough to be buffeted from side to side by the waves. Soon after we were on board, the captain moved the ship around to the other side of the small island and the rocking subsided a bit. Joanne felt sea sick for the rest of the day though.

Super turtle!

Swiss couple on the dry deck

Only the ship crew were around, so we realised that we had indeed missed the second dive of the day. At least it gave us some time to settle in to our rooms and relax a little without needing to get orders barked at us. Not long after we were back on deck the boat swept back around the island where people started climbing in from the water. The two dive masters introduced themselves as Torren and Steve and invited us to help ourselves to lunch which was just being laid out. As they dried off enough to come up to the dry deck, we met the other divers filing in for their lunch. It was too many names for me to remember in one go, but over the next few days we had a pleasant time getting to know them a bit better. There was another Michael, who had tattoos of Buddha and an om, so he clearly liked things eastern, and with him, his girlfriend [whose name I've forgotten], both Swiss. There was Gill from England, who told me that he had won this trip in a photography competition, so we weren't the only “fakes”; he was constantly lugging huge amounts of apparatus around with him because he was a professional photographer, and the waterproof casing for his rig made it even bigger. There was a German guy called Volker who was suffering from a cold and bad ears meaning that he was unable to dive for most of the trip, so he looked miserable most of the time but cheered up when he had a few beers and talked about his travels; he has travelled a lot.

Catherine on the dry deck

There was Weijin, according to Steve and Torren, the only good Chinese diver. She slept almost constantly in between dives, although she was trying to study for her Rescue Diver course, so I assume it's not very interesting. Then there was Alexia the South African whose parents were from "Rhodesia". And finally Mimi and Sophie, a Quebecoise pair who Joanne judged from their tactile relationship were probably a couple. Catherine was also Quebecoise and Jeff was from Chicago, but had been living in Geneva for many years, and his children never knew America. By the end of the trip they had me convinced that a career in the UN would not be something to knock back. I think I got on with the two of them best out of the lot, and I don't think that it was just because we'd started off in the same boat together; they were both really nice. The underwater photos are all actually taken by Jeff, except for the turtle, which he lent me his camera for; several of them have a circular black boundry because he forgot to tell me that the wide-angle lens was attached and takes in some of the waterproof case if you don't zoom.

But we were not to be integrated in with the other divers yet: our first dive was to be an “orientation” dive with everyone else going with Steve and just the four of us led by Torren, who is American and seemed to be something of a narcissist; he liberally infused his pre-dive briefings with witticisms like “and you have nothing to worry about because Steve and I are the two best.... looking dive masters in Thailand”. However when he saw me looking a bit uncertain trying to attach my gear to the air cylinder, he came up and said “been a while has it?” which was exactly the sort of thing I'd been worried about all along. Joanne and I had gone diving a few weeks earlier in Cambodia, specifically as a refresher because we knew we were going to dive in Thailand, but it had obviously done no good. Then I realised that, although we had been taken through all the basic “skills” like clearing the mask if it floods, retrieving a dropped regulator (the device you put in your mouth which delivers the air), and what to do in an “out of air” emergency, out kit had been assembled for us then. All the other skills are essential, life-saving in an emergency, but they are not very difficult and, I find, so easy that they are impossible to forget. What I really need from a refresher course is “how to put your kit together”. I had the same problem when we went diving in Cuba several years before and I don't like it much because everyone else is an expert and this just makes you look like a complete novice even though you are supposed to be a licensed diver. But Torren didn't actually look too worried, he was just making fun of me. Then came the next stage of preparation before a dive, after you have put you kit together and put it on, you are trained that you should carry out “buddy checks”. You always dive with a “buddy” for safety (and fun, and so on, so goes the training manual). At this stage you are supposed to remember a short list of checks to carry out like making sure your buddy's air is turned on. The training manual suggest that you remember the list of tasks using the most ridiculous mnemonic I have ever heard, in fact at the time I was training to get my dive certification I told some of my friends that it would be easier remembering the actual list: Buoyancy, Weights, Release, Air, and Final-OK, than the supposedly helpful acronym. I tried, but could not remember it. Gavin, I have to say, wins the prize because I was able to remember his much more memorable, apparently, “Big Wankers Remember Acronyms Falsely” shortly after which Dorian's “Big Willies Rip And Fray” came to mind. It was much later that I remembered the awful original “Begin With Review And Friend”. Later Torren revealed one with a local twist: Bangkok Women Really Are Fellas. I thought of a few more, but none are appropriate here, suffice to say that one begins “Beautiful Women Require”.

Manta ray

The first dive was incredible. The water was 28C, and no sooner had we submerged than a huge manta ray passed within a few metres of the group. We were probably only five metres down. A bit further down and several more manta rays swam around us. I was very impressed, having never seen anything bigger than a barracuda on a dive before. We didn't go deeper than 20 metres, but we'd had a fantastic dive. When we came up Torren said “well that was some orientation dive, wasn't it?”. The next dive was in the same location and we saw manta rays again, but also sea cucumbers, and my personal favourite, an octopus. It was hunting and it kept changing its shape, colour, and texture, so that it looked like coral one second, sand the next, with brief flickers of octopus in between. It oozed from one location and shape to the next, while all around were fish, presumably its prey, that appeared to be completely hypnotised and staring at it. They were in its spell. And around the fish were a shoal of divers, equally hypnotised.

Someone diviing past brain coral

I could have watched the octopus for the entire dive, but Torren seemed keen to get on with the manta ray spotting. All these prize sightings were on top of a “usual” fantastic array of corals, tropical fish, crustaceans, and so on. I had really enjoyed these two amazing dives, but I still did not feel gripped by the obsession that most people who dive regularly, and certainly everyone on the boat , do. It occurred to me that diving is a bit like those Umbro books we used to get as children, where you tick off all the various things that you've seen, which are all worth different points; they came in many varieties: one book for birds, another for vehicles, another for trees, and many more. Diving is the same: after every dive people seem compelled to roll off everything the spotted on the dive and compare notes with each other, as well as their “best ever” spotting experiences. It's just the rules of the sport.

Joanne and me diving

Star fish

So for the record: manta rays (80 points for one, 150 points for several, 200 points because one swam really close past me); loads of sting rays (30 each); a couple of eagle rays (70 points each); puffer fish (20 points); box fish (20 points); octopus (50 points for one, but I'd give it 200); sea cucumbers (10 points, I'd give 30); leopard shark (100 points; all sharks are high-scorers, but this one is small); lion fish (50 points); scorpion fish (40 points); giant turtles (50 points, but 200 for swimming with one); tuna (40 points); porcupine fish (30 points, but I'd say 60); bat fish (20, but 200 if you swim in their shoal judging by the way Torren acted); loads of moray eels (25 points each); lobsters (30 points); and so on.

Giant anemone

OK, I'm being completely facetious, but this is really how it seemed to me. The points are inferred from how excited people get about their sightings and what people talk about. Obviously people have their own preferences too, hence my own scores, but there seems to be an agreed hierarchy of sightings. But the point is, I did see a huge variety of very interesting organisms, although my air was a bit lower than everyone else's on the dive where everybody saw a black-tipped reef shark at the point when Joanne (as my buddy) and I were just surfacing (250 points down – no fair!). The manta rays were beautiful and graceful, flapping slowly through the water, but my highlights were definitely the octopi, the porcupine fish, and the giant turtles.

Coral

The octopus I've already describe and I don't think I'll eat another one after that; they do taste delicious, but they are even better alive. Porcupine fish just look really cute, with square faces and big googly eyes they look a bit like boxer puppies or something, and on one night dive, where I buddied up with Catherine because Joanne wasn't feeling well, a porcupine fish followed us around for ages, hiding behind corals then reappearing. On that same dive we laughed (as far as you can underwater) at a bat fish which trailed along right behind Weijin for ages then started following me instead. This is apparently what bat fish do and Torren had decided to immerse himself in this feature by swimming with the shoal. He didn't tell anyone his plan and of course nobody else knew where he'd gone and we spent some time looking for him. When we came up someone said “That's the first dive I've been on where we've had to conduct a search and rescue for the dive master”.

Sting ray

“I was king of the bat fish” he said defensively. Last of my favourites are the giant turtles: they're just lovely. We saw one on the bottom, breaking up the corals with its fins then scooping the shards up to munch. It didn't look appetising at all. When we were surfacing another one swam past close to us and when we surfaced we saw why: one of the boat-hands was throwing pieces of banana into the water and the turtle was swimming around chomping them down. Having seen the other one munching on dry coral I can imagine how wonderful banana must taste to them, but wasn't this a little unethical? If you feed wild animals you change their behaviour and then they lose their fear of humans and forget how to look after themselves... forget all that! Because it wasn't shy of humans at all, a few of us took the opportunity to swim around with it. It was quite friendly and would swim right up to us. Apparently that's just the way they are, but I wasn't at all convinced that the banana played to part.

Giant turtle poses for Gil

Moray eel

The first night we were there, they played what I can only describe as a propaganda video about shark conservation and exploitation. Alexia said “I'm sure you played this last year” as she was now on her third same consecutive trip. “I play this on every trip”, replied Torren. It was the rather over-dramatic, I thought, tale of one man who wanted to start a “Save the Sharks” campaign, because he felt that they were not given fair treatment because of their unrepresentative bad public image, unlike seals, dolphins, or whales, which are all considered cute. Things could change, he points out, because in Jonah's day, whales were the baddies. He went to the Galápagos Islands and Ecuador (I think it was) to see how their fantastic shark protection laws worked, but while he was making his film they both diluted them when they came under pressure from the “shark finning” mafia, the arch villains, whose power base is Taiwan.

Nudibranch

This is why sharks are becoming extinct he reasoned: just the fin is taken to give the consumer “power” and the rest of the animal is thrown away. The figures are shocking: sharks are definitely on an extinction trajectory, so I agreed with the films's message, I just thought it was over-dramatised. Near the end of the film, there is a scene with him alone in hospital, the rest of his allies having abandoned the cause because of fears for their lives, and he has “flesh eating bug, Staphylococcus” caught from the tropical waters he was diving in, in search of sharks. If they don't amputate his legs, it may reach into his abdomen where there will be no stopping it. Not surprisingly the antibiotics work and he lives happily ever after, even if millions of sharks every year don't. There was some silver lining about pro-shark demonstrations in Ecuador, but I don't fancy the sharks' chances in the long run.

Lobster

Every day during the trip my hair seemed a bit shorter. I don't know if the salt water was causing the condition of the ends to get so bad that it was snapping, or if it was somehow encouraging it to knot up more so that it was becoming thicker and shorter, but after one dive I came up and couldn't take off my gear because one dreadlock was tangled fast around the valve of my air tank. Joanne was forced to tear me free, leaving behind a big chunk of hair. That one dreadlock is now significantly shorter than the rest, but I suspect all of them were getting tangled to a lesser degree throughout, and that's how my hair ended up several inches shorter by the end.

Puffer fish hides behind some coral

The food on the trip was also excellent. What a difference to any other “all inclusive” trips we've taken on our travels. When the cook (rarely) showed her face out of the kitchen, the two dive master insisted that we give her a round of applause, to which she looked very pleased and a little embarrassed.

Giant turtle swims past me

Giant turtle just after breathing

Not content with completely throwing our travel budget out of the window, Joanne and I decided to do a nitrox course while we were on the boat. Well, we might as well fill in our time between dives since the weather was so poor. It rained on three of the days so there was little opportunity to spend the time on the sun deck. In fact I never visited it, but Sophie managed to get quite badly burned during one of the brief sunny spells. Actually there were a few reasons for doing the course. One was slightly peer pressure: everyone else was already qualified to dive with nitrox or else doing the course, so every body except us would be diving with enriched air if we didn't do it too. In practice this meant that we wouldn't be able to go as deep or would not be able to stay down as long as everyone else, because nitrox reduces your exposure to nitrogen, which means that you can dive for deeper and longer without having the same risk of decompression sickness, or the bends.

Giant turtle escape Gil's spotlights

Another reason is that Joanne's main diving ambition is to dive in the Red Sea, where most of the good sites are at a depth that you really need to dive with enriched air to get the most out of it, so I thought we may as well get trained now, since that will probably be our next diving trip. Finally, it meant that we would be able to get the most of this trip, and a few people reported that they felt less physical strain on their bodies when there was less nitrogen in the mix. So we did it, and half of our dives were nitrox dives, and we are now both qualified to dive with enriched air. There's not really much to the course: in practice all you really need to know is that you have to check that the air mix is what it says on the label, and then to set your dive computer to match whatever mix you measured.

My poor toes

Giant turtle swallows a lump of banana

Unlike everyone else on the trip, we needed to hire all of our equipment, because we didn't want to be carrying it all around the world with us. Luckily James had organised that we could hire the equipment for free, but the dive computers were not included. Unfortunately the type of fins they had for hire do not fit me well. [Divers insist on calling flippers – fins and gas bottles – cylinders.

Giant turtle eats from Joanne's hand

For some reason they get very upset if you get it wrong. I've never been able to work that one out]. I've rented them before, but they've not been too bad, however this was really intensive diving and my feet suffered badly. After a couple of days people were saying “ow that looks sore”, but by the last full day of diving I was in agony and had to miss the last dive. I did the final dive of the trip, which was first thing the next morning because we had to be back early for Jeff's flight. To make up for that, there had been five dives in the one day two days previously. Five dives in day really is a crazy amount, and is really only possible if you are diving with nitrox. Five dives is really a bit too much in one day; it gets boring, and actually I think five days of diving in a row, even if they're not full days, is also too much. I would have been quite happy with three days. Gill who was on the freebee also said that he found his trip too long, but he had six days. So, the diving was excellent and I saw some beautiful, incredible things, but I still don't think I really have the passion for it. The rest of the people on that boat seem to only dive when they go on holiday: I know there are many people who go to another country, and all they experience of it are dive sites, dive resorts, and the places around dive resorts. It's too much! Diving is great, but it's not life.

Joanne and Catherine play with the giant turtle

written by

The Happy Couple on May 6, 2009 from Similan Islands, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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