Diving the Similan Islands

So after our little jungle adventure, it was time to head to Khao Lak and start on a diving adventure. We had booked a 3 day/2 night liveaboard dive trip in conjunction with getting our Advanced Open Water dive cards. In order to obtain your AOW, you go on 5 dives where you have to perform certain objectives under the water. Two of the dives must be a deep water dive and a navigation dive. The other three you have the option of many other dives.
The first 3 dives we did the day before the liveaboard trip on the local reef in Khao Lak. They were called Navigation, Search and Retrieve, and Peak Performance Buoyancy. We went over some theory before heading out on the boat to dive. The navigation dive involved using a compass underwater to be able to get back to the same spot. For the search and retrieve dive, we worked as a team doing different search patterns to locate stuff under the water. For the heavy objects, we strapped them to a bag that is filled with air from your tank to make it easy to lift the object to the surface.

The peak performance buoyancy dive was the most important one of them all. For those of you that have dived before, you understand how being neutrally buoyant is so important while being underwater. It allows you to control yourself underwater and makes things feel a lot more comfortable. When you are neutrally buoyant, you can control your position in the water with your breathing. Being positively buoyant will make you rise to the surface which when done too quickly can cause "the bends". Being too negatively buoyant will cause you drop like a rock in the water which also isn't desirable.
Ok enough with the lesson you are saying and get to the good stuff. We met our fellow divers the morning we were set to leave. There was a fellow Canadian, two French, two Slovaks, and an American. For dive masters, there was a Thai and a German. A nice mix of people from around the world.
Our boat was called the Nang Nuan and was operated by Sea Dragon. It was kind of known as the "backpacker boat" since it was relatively cheap and everyone had to sleep in the same spot. It wasn't a huge boat but definitely had a lot of character. When we first pulled up to her at the dock, the American asked if this was the boat that took us to the boat we were staying in. Haha nope this is the one.

Courtesy of Sea Dragon

Our Boat

We jumped on our beauty boat and began puttering out to Koh Ban. The trip out there lasted 5 hours because our boat wasn't a speed demon by any means. We spent the time getting to know the people on the boat and relaxing. The ocean was pretty calm so it was a good ride.
Our first dive was our deep dive for our AOW course. For this one we basically made our way down to 30 meters slowly and had a look at our dive computers and wrote some stuff down on a board. Then we cruised around looking at the coral and fish. Roberta had been having some difficulties equalizing her one ear in the past, so she was a bit nervous. But it behaved for her so that was awesome.
The part above was written right after our dive trip and now it's a few weeks later and most of it is jumbled together in my head. But I can give a good synopsis.

Hanging out on the upper deck

It was an awesome trip. Our fellow divers were a lot of fun. Our group was Peter, Patrick, Andy (the dive master), Roberta, and I. Peter was the 50-something American that was a bit of a goof (in a good way) that had spent much of his life traveling around the world on a budget and had a lot of interesting stories. While diving he was always all over the place and we had many chuckles about that. Patrick was a Quebecer from Hull. He was an avid Montreal Canadians fan so it was awesome to have someone to bullshit about hockey with over a couple of beers after each day of diving. He took tons of footage with his Go Pro and is going to share some footage once he edits it at home so that will be cool.

Our dive team

The diving itself was good. There was some cool dives in which we were cruising around some huge underwater boulders and going through some caves and such. We did a night dive which was cool to experience. Many of the fish were sleeping and the crabs and lobster crawled out of their hiding places. Also saw phosphorescent plankon in the dark which was cool.

The fish were plentiful. By the end of all the dives we were able to identify many of them. We saw parrotfish, sting rays, triggerfish, lion fish, clownfish, barracuda, snappers, some huge eels along with many other kinds of fish. Some cleaner wrasse would occasionally start chewing at my ears and I would try to flush them away. Saw 4-5 turtles while on the boat and jumped off to snorkel with them.

The coral wasn't as spectacular as I was expecting. There was areas where much of it was dead due to the changing ocean conditions. But there were dives with nice huge sea fans and multicoloured soft corals.

Beach on one of the islands

All in all in was a great trip. We did 12 dives in 4 days. We both became much more comfortable under the water and were able to maneuver ourselves around without much effort. We saw many cool things and met some great people. It definitely showed us that we would like to do more diving in the future.

Cruising from beach to boat - Similan Islands, Thailand - YouTube
Ps We did take some photos with our underwater camera, but can't get them in our iPad until we get back so here are a couple off the web.

Courtesy of Google

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