Thailand: Khao Lak & a boat in the Similan Islands

Everything went very quickly from arriving in Khao lak for our PADI course to departing a week later. We had one afternoon to chill out after getting back from Khao Sok and then training started the next day. We had one day of theory in the dive center before our 3hr pool session the next morning. After this we were off on the boat and heading out to sea!

The first dive in open water was VERY surreal. Your mostly concentrating on your equipment, but every now and then it will feel like second nature and you will start looking around at all the fish. There were SO many here that it was impossible to keep a fish diary like we did for Koh Wai, instead we would recognise similar species in about 10 different variations to what we were used to.

Every day we did 3 or 4 dives, Nick did a few more than me as I had to give my ear a rest from equalizing. Most people on the boat had to sit one or two dives out as you are on the go from 6am to 10pm. The food was excellent, imagine getting out of the water with 2hrs to go before your next dive and you are greeted with cheese (real cheese), crackers and olives- amazing.

Just for the record: I was very cold

Enough said about food, back to marine life. We were treated to some amazing sights. On our 2nd or 3rd open water dive we were at a site called deep 6 where we had a steep incline which we were swimming along (reef to our left and open sea to our right), we saw many large fish including a school of trevellies and a baracuda that emerged from the blue. On our second day, as normal, all the fruit peelings and food bits were thrown off the back of the boat and loads of fish came to feed. However after 10mins we heard someone say "sea turtle" and sure enough a large female green sea turtle had come to forage on the fruit leftovers. It didn't take long for me and Nick, plus one other from the boat to decide that we were getting in the water food scraps or no food scraps. This was the best decision. As I was about to jump in our scuba instructor handed me a piece of watermelon husk and within 2 minutes I had a sea turtle munching on it in a very leisurely fashion whilst I was trying to contain my excitement. She was very curious and stayed for some time, not afriad to swim right underneath you or make you move out of the way!

We had plenty more dives to do after that at some amazing sites, my favorite of which was called 3trees. We saw another sea turtle here along with a sea snake, giant porcupine fish, nudibranch (google it) and a cool looking juvenille fish which I have forgotten the name of. On our last dive- a wreck dive we saw multiple sting rays, huge schools of fish you could hardly see through, loads of new nudibranches, lots of different puffer fish, a pipe fish that looked like a shoelace and a ghost pipe fish- a rare spot (the underwater sign for which is the same as looking like a gangster).

I think I have told most of the exciting bits although I could go one for a while yet! Needless to say we collapsed and slept a lot when we got back before heading off to our next stop: Krabi.