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Published: March 3rd 2007
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We finally joined Khaolak Scuba Adventures 24th trip on 3rd March, looking forward to 4 days and 3 nights aboard the Manta Queen II and hopefully 14 amazing dives (11 day and 3 night dives). The journey took us north toward the Similan Islands, renowned for providing some of the best diving in the world and a few other famous spots, one in particular called Kho Bon where Manta Ray’s are almost always found feeding due to currents found there.
I shan’t bore you with the details of the air-conditioned double cabin, sun deck, clear water, good company and fantastic food (particularly from our viewpoint of being used to the cheapest roadside food we could find), but for you fish heads out there, here’s a few highlights of the wildlife that we saw.
Triton trigger fish, big moray eels, Feather stars, cuttlefish, shrimps, reef sharks, leopard (or zebra) sharks, Hawksbill turtles, boxfish, Nemo! (anemone fish - we’re ashamed to say we can’t remember what species), numerous varieties of butterfly and angel fish, huge barracuda, scorpion/lion fish, sea horses, potato groupers, nurse sharks, ghost pipe fish, stonefish, octopus and some massive blue-spotted puffer fish.
You may notice Manta
Ray missing from that list….. whilst I got a pretty good glimpse of one, Lexa only managed to catch sight of a wing disappearing into the distance and neither of us felt like we had seen one properly. By the way if you don’t know these spectacular creatures have a ‘wingspan’ of around 3m and are filter feeders ‘flying’ through the sea scooping up food into their mouths. Despite our misfortune, Kho Bon was still a great dive and a guy called Del on the boat got some good video for us to see and feel envious about (and it’s his photo of the Manta’s here), meanwhile Manta Rays remain on our diving to-do list!
One of the more famous sites we dived was Richelieu Rock, an isolated outcrop that just breaks the surface at low tide. It was named by Jacques Cousteau who thought that the purple soft coral that covers a lot of the site was the same colour as Cardinal Richelieu’s cloak (I think you should all jot that down in case if comes up in a pub quiz one day). We dove this sight 3 times and had only just scratched the surface, there is
that much to see. I loved the big schools of mean looking barracuda that just hang around like thugs waiting to pounce on their victims and as you can see from the photos, the Ghost Pipe Fish we saw there are just cool, cartoon, multi-coloured, skydiving pipe cleaners….bizarre.
During our last dive on the Boonsung dredger wreck, Lexa had the dubious pleasure of being cleaned by a ‘cleaner wrasse’! It’s common to see these fish tickling away at the skin of other bigger fish in their normal symbiotic relationship of one getting some food whilst the other gets cleaned, but it was the first time either of us had been targeted by one of them…obvious it’s not as easy to maintain our normally high standards of personal hygiene whilst backpacking, but I didn’t think it had got that bad!
We met some great people on the boat, our dive buddies Maarten and Laure from Denmark, Tim and Amanda from the UK (beautifully captured here with Ghost Pipe fish - sorry guys you know how difficult it is to look cool in scuba gear!) and Helen from Waaaleeess (said in a dodgy Welsh accent) who kept the three Swedish
lads in check and amused me with her accent for the whole trip. If you are reading this Helen, you’ll be glad to know that you left a permanent mark on our vocabulary and every time we see something good we both say ’cooo-el’ (also in a dodgy Welsh accent).
So returning to Khao Lak we were really pleased to have done the trip, Khaolak Scuba Adventures were great and come highly recommended and we would love to dive the area again. The only problem we had as we left the boat was the thought of going back to cheap chicken and filtered tap water!
By the way thanks to Del, Dan and Raffa for the underwater photo’s. We have many gadgets with us, but are carrying too much stuff already to justify an underwater camera as well!
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