The Thailand Sub Aqua Club

Diving in Phuket in the off season

Having to take my vacation in little bits and pieces, a major dive trip such as a live-aboard cruise was not in the cards for me this year. Not being able to take my passport with me (visa/work permit up for renewal) didn't make the planning easier - or perhaps it did!

I've always heard it said that if there is one place you should not waste time on in Thailand during the South East Monsoon, it is Phuket. Rumors have it that the weather is lousy, the viz non-existent, and the whole place dead.

Alternative dive sites in Thailand are actually quite few. The cruises into the Andaman Sea are closed down, diving in Samui is not exactly world-class, and I had recently been to Koh Tao and Sail Rock so they were out as well.

Stuck with Phuket! I decided to chance it and go anyway. I picked up a few phone numbers, packed the bags, armed myself with various diving books on Thailand and took off for 6 days of diving.

It was raining slightly when I landed in the evening on July 18th. When I woke up the next morning, the sun was shining from a clear blue sky, although the streets were wet from rain earlier. I had arranged to go diving with H2O Sportz, a small outfit that does its diving from high-powered speed boats, ensuring that you can leave an hour after everybody else and get home 2 hours before everybody else. In this particular case, that was stupid!

We had barely left port when a major squall came in from the Indian Ocean. The sea, flat as a pancake 2 minutes earlier, soon featured 1-meter waves, and it was raining, albeit mildly.

We made it to Shark Point, made one dive, and came up to 1.5 meter waves, heavy rain, and 3 extremely seasick non-divers waiting on the boat for our return! The second dive, planned for Koh Dok Mai, was abandoned, and we made for port. We had to keep wetsuits and masks on, as the waves were crashing over the bow and the rain was pouring down. It took 2 hours to get back to the marina, normally a half-hour ride. Thrashing about in a boat filled with sick people, gear flying, waves threatening to drown you and sink your boat is not my idea of a vacation.

Well back in Patong, after visiting the temple and saying a silent prayer of thanks for still being alive, I started making the rounds to all the major dive shops, searching for somebody with a bigger boat. For a split second I even considered booking myself a plane ticket to Koh Samui and take a boat to Koh Tao from there, but fortunately I thought better of it.

The following 4 days I dived with South East Asia Divers out of Patong. The weather was marvelous, with only the odd cloud (no rain), and the sea was flat. There was no current to speak of, and I had great diving all around the east side of Phuket.

My logbook reveals the following:
Shark Point
5 leopard sharks on one dive, 2 on another and 3 on the last dive I did there. Also at Shark Point, loads of morays in all shapes, colors and sizes, lionfish all over the place (they ought to train all students here, teach you to keep your hands nicely tucked in...), scorpionfish up to 40 cm long. Viz not good (5 meters), except on the 5-shark dive. Slight E-W current but nothing much. Nice coral, soft and hard, huge gorgonian seafans, anemones. Good site, primarily because of the leopard sharks. Really cute animals. Depth 5-25 meters.

Phi Phi Lay / Koh Bida Nice caverns, good viz (15-18 meters) at the 10-meter mark but deeper down the viz is anywhere between lousy and not great! Nice wall at Koh Bida, really beautiful, with great big morays poking out all over the place. Huge scorpionfish as well, and a 2-meter black and white banded seasnake, beautiful animal! No current at all. Soft and hard coral, anemones. Depth 5-25 meters.

Anemone Reef
The absolute highlight of the trip. Completely submerged reef 200 meters off Shark Point, cannot be dived very often, particularly if there are students on the boat. Very small reef, dived by descending to the bottom (22 meters) and working your way around the reef 5-6 times, all the while ascending to shallower depth, until you reach a perfect safety stop area in 5-6 meters. Reef covered in anemones, hence the name, but it might as well be called Moray Reef or Scorpionfish Reef, or Lionfish Reef. These creatures are all over the place, 10s and 100s of them!!! Saw yellow morays, black morays, green morays, leopard spotted morays, yellow-banded morays, you name it. Some as thick as a thigh, and you can only guess at how long they were, I didn't try luring them out!. Some smaller ones were free-swimming. The entire reef is littered with huge scorpionfish, and at the bottom we even saw ghost shrimp and pipefish!!! Again huge seafans. Also saw a enormous porcupinefish, must have been about a meter long and half a meter in diameter!

Racha Noi
Visibility-wise by far the best. Must have been around 25 meters. The bottom slopes down from shore to depths of 30-35 meters and more, but you stay around 25. The bottom is littered with boulders and scattered reefs. Saw 3 octopi, cuttlefish, huge shoal of tuna (beautiful!), barracuda, 5 titan triggerfish, morays, spotted rays. During surface interval, a shoal of about 10 bottle-nosed dolphins performed!!! Current was quite strong on one dive here, although according to the tide tables there should be none. Just proves that it is not just in Pattaya/Samae San that Thai tide tables are best used for toilet paper and to light barbecues with....

Price-wise, Shark Point goes for 1,250, Phi Phi and Racha for 1,500. This gets you 2 dives, divemaster, lunch, fruit and soft drinks. Usually you get picked up around 07:45 and you are back in your hotel 16:00. I dived with South East Asia Divers in Patong, great outfit, fantastic boat, very competent divemaster. I did one day with another outfit which shall remain unnamed, as others may have had good experiences with them - I did not. Suffice it to say that South East Asia has a reputation for having the best boat, and their prices are the same as everybody else's so why settle for less ? Mind you, in the low season they do not go out on Sundays. Also, they only do night dives on Wednesdays, unless you want to shore-dive off the west coast of Phuket.

I hope I have made it clear that Phuket still has a lot to offer, even in the monsoon season. Bear in mind, though, that I could have been lucky. You might hit a week of solid rain and high seas, there is no telling. But then, you are going to get wet anyway, aren't you...?

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