Swimming with beasts
Two more denziens to add to my bestiary today, firstly the Grey Reef Shark. Ok, ok, so it isn’t a man eater, but this thing was freaking BIG. I was diving in a place called the Southwest Pinnacle, just between Ko Tao and the mainland. The pinnacle is apparently famed for its superbly beautiful diving. On the way there my diving instructor, Flavia (of Amazing Divers along Mad Haa harbour any visiting should definately seek her out, he training is A*), went over the basic procedures with me. As we pulled up in our boat, the staff of which I’m getting on pretty well with now after doing my Open Water course, my heart sank a little as I realized that there were other boats everywhere.
We waited our turn or whatever, and jumped into the sea. ( I wanted to put a word begining with ‘D’ there but couldn’t decide on dived or dove, thinking about it, it’s probably dove.) Poking my head underwater I was first hit by an explosion of bubbles from all the other divers far below. This was not encouraging. I descended without issue, floating down to 14m. Rising out of the depths though, from about 14m onwards was the most amazing scenery I’ve ever seen. Huge rock formations sporting soft luminuos coral housed the food for schools of fish reaching into the hundreds. We descended a little further, as an Open Water trainee I was only meant to go to a maximum of 18m, which of course I stuck to, just because my depth guage recorded a maximum depth of 23 meters doesn’t mean I actually went that far. For those that haven’t dived (dove?) before, the difference between 18 and 23 meters can be quite significant. For those of you who have dove (dived?) and are scoffing at this ‘cos you’re all Advanced Divers or similar I’d love to smugly point out that Nitrogen Narcosis can occure from 25 meters onwards, and as a mere entry level diver, I don’t feel much equipped to deal with eurphoria at 4 atmospheres.
My inner editor is telling me to stop with the jargon and get to the interesting stuff.
So, along the sea floor, about 5-8 meteres below me was a Reef Shark. It swam quickly and there wasn’t a single diver near me who didn’t stop to stare. It looked powerful in the water, thick and square, like a surf board. I floated in wonder, wanting to be down there next to it, goading it into a frenzied attack, just to see what it would be like. I didn’t of course, but I really wanted to.
Within five minutes a long thin dart, bigger than most of the other fish by nearly double, fired out of the blue. The Barracuda’s savage underbite looked like it could tear through a wall if need be.
That reminds me, yesterday when it was just me and Flavia diving, we saw a Mauray eel (sp!) sitting amongts some rocks. I was nervous for 2 reasons, firstly, eels, especially Mauray eels, move like snakes and the last thing I wanted was to have an absolute panic at 18 meters, but secondly I’ve read stories where poeple have had their whole arm bitten off by the brutes. I was so intrigued by the monster though, that I swam straight into the rock overhang above it. The cuts and scrapes I got from this were only made worse when a small blue fish came and started trying to graze from my open wounds. I felt a bit like Gia, the earth mother, feeding my wild, only, you know, with scuba gear on and that.
Lauren has aso been plenty happy these past few days. The sun has been scorching and she has become noticeably more brown each time I step back onto Terra Ferma. We went hunting for some badminton rackets today for a bit of sophisticated bat n ball but to no avail, annoyingly, a lot of locals in the street seem to have them so we’re sure they’re sold around here somewhere.
I passed my Open Water and can now dive without an instructor up to 18m’s. This, however, is not enough, and I desperately want to get my Advanced Diver so I can go to 40meters. It’s the next level up and to be honest, for what I want I wouldn’t ever need to go further than that. Unless of course I wanted to dive back home in the Thames then I’d need to do the avoiding needles, corpses and shopping trolleys certification.
Tags: Diving, Ko Tao, Shark, Thailand, Travel
mikeloken
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