Thailand: the dives

(I cringed when I re-read my two previous Thailand posts from day 1 and 2, both of which gave me the impression of someone taking a memory dump and forgetting to wipe. I decided instead to chronical the trip not in a day-by-day order, but in a subject-by-subject order of the highlights and low lights as I recall)

My 14th, 15th and 16th logged dives deserve a special post aside from the other Thailand highlights.

Since my last dive was in Cancun back in Springbreak2001, my first dive in Thailand was a refresher course courtesy of Big Bubble dive center, a beach dive at Ao Leuk near Ko Tao, around a depressing reef in pretty bad shape. Divemaster was German, as were the other two girls joining the refresher dive. I was pretty nervous beforehand and fumbled with setting up my rental gear, but relaxed as soon as we got in the water. I went through all the drills like I didn't miss a day of diving, and the divemaster complimented on my buoancy control. We saw some school of small fish and damaged corals through average visibility (~10m). 60 minutes at mostly shallow depth (<10m).

2 more boat dives at Hin Bai, otherwise known as Sail Rock, a pinnacle between Ko Tao and Ko Pha Ngan(courtesy of the two German Thomases from the dive shop at Dreamland Resort). Sail Rock was listed in the Lonely Planet as one of the most spectacular dive sites in Thailand. The pinnacle was (by my estimate) no more than 60m in circumference above the surface, and we just swam around and around the pinnacle during our two dives. There was a "chimney" on the north side of the pinnacle, a tube of rock/coral where you can pop in at 20m deep and pop out at around 10. It sounded like a cool idea, but it was actually pretty boring as there's nothing to see inside the tube. I also had problem equilibriating my sinus pressure at 20m so I only went through the chimney once. The visibility was poor, and we got lost trying to find the deep water pinnacle. Only afterwards did I find out that the deep water pinnacle was THE hot spot for whale sharks. Damn.

However since the poor visibility was caused by a warm uprising current bringing up the sediments from the deep water, there was plenty of fish joining the ocean buffet line. To say that we saw a lot of fish would be unfair, as it was more accurate to say that a boatload (sorry, bad joke) of fish tried to ignore us during their lunchtime. Being surrounded by schools of 200+ tuna, the smallest of which being big enough to swallow your hand whole, was something I have yet experienced underwater. Besides tuna/jackfish schools, I also saw my first barracuda. It was big, maybe 3-4 feet long, but somehow more graceful and less intimidating when seen swimming underwater than seen frozen in the fish market.

I had a lot of problem equilibriating during the two dives, they were both pretty deep (between 15 and 18m or 50 and 60 feet) and we had to free decend without the aid of a line. I went down super slow and hovered a couple meters above my buddy pretty much the whole time, even then my eardrums were (and still are a little, a week after) still hurting like a bitch. To put things in perspective, air pressure is .5 ATM at 5000m in the air, 1 ATM at sea level, and 3 ATM 60 feet deep. Me and my chronically stuffy sinus are simply not built for even leisure SCUBA diving. I ended both dives with such a profusion of nosebleed, I wondered if I left a trail of red while I was underwater. On second thought, maybe not seeing those whalesharks and their buddies was a blessing in disguise.

But despite the nosebleed and ear pains, my 3 dives were still an overwhelmingly positive experience.