Diving in the Similan Islands

I'm back on dry land after an amazing four-day trip through the Similan and Surin Islands, off the west coast of Thailand, NW of Phuket.

It took a solid half day of travel to get to the dock and to see the Manta Queen II, which was my home during my scuba adventure. There were about 15 other divers on board from France, Canada, Ireland, England, the States, Sweden and Norway - a pretty diverse group. I was put in the group with the most experience so we could maximize the amount of time we were under water (newbies tend to go through their air faster), and I dived with one Englishman, a Canadian girl and 2 girls from Ireland. Our divemaster was Thorston from Belgium. He'd been diving in the area for a long time, and he knew a lot about the sites we were diving.

My first dive was amazing... fabulous visibility and tons of fish swimming around, many of them new to me. That was probably some of the best visibility that we had, but over the four days, we saw some truly amazing things.

Every day, we were woken up at 6:30 or 7am, had a small breakfast of fruit and toast, then were in the water by 7:30 or 8am. After we came up, breakfast was ready. Dive #2 was usually after 2 hours out of the water, and that was always followed by lunch. About two hours after that came dive #3 and a snack. Then around sunset, we got geared up again and hopped in for dive #4 of the day. By about 9pm, we were all exhausted and usually in bed.

Remember those elusive whale sharks I wrote about back in Utila? Well, on dive #3, I heard some screams underwater and it was the Canadian girl, who was ueberexcited about the massive whale shark that just swam by her! I turned and saw it, and we swam with it for about a minute or two before it went off into the distance. Amazing! Definitely a diving highlight for me.

I learned a lot more about little things to be found in the the Indian Ocean, like the ghost pipefish, and I even found a normal pipefish on my own! Most of our dives were over an hour, which was fabulous. There was so much to see, I didn't want to come up any earlier. Some other highlights were catching three cuttlefish in some sort of threesome, much like the picture on this wikipedia article. And on our very last dive, as we were waiting on our five minute safety stop, there was a massive school of squid about 15 feet below us just swimming in formation. It was an appropriate farewell from them (the squid). I saw countless moray eels, triggerfish, Nemos, and other really cool stuff. We didn't see a manta ray, which I was hoping for, but there will always be other dive trips.

All in all, it was an absolutely amazing trip, and I'm glad that it was recommended to me. The boat, the staff, my fellow divers, and the sites themselves were fabulous!