Fun diving from Phuket on Koh Bida Nok and Turtle Rock on Koh Phi Phi Leh

Logged Dives #1601-1602 February 24, 2019

Our dives today were here

Our dive sites, Koh Bida Nok and Turtle Rock, just north of Maya Bay on Koh Phi Phi Leh, are described at the link from which this map was taken, with attribution:
https://www.phiphidiving.com/phiphi-diving-map.htm

We decided to dive today with Sea Fun Divers, https://www.seafundivers.com/.  We chose them because we wanted to dive at Koh Phi Phi this Sunday and they were one of the only shops with their own boats going there. Also they immediately answered my email which I sent out on return to Patong from our half day diving with Merlin Divers in Kamala. I sent the mail while we were getting cleaned up from our diving with intent to go walking around to different dive shops in Patong, but I was able to arrange to dive with Sea Fun via email without leaving my hotel room. So instead of working up a sweat, we settled our next day diving with no hassle and celebrated with cheap beer from the downstairs 7/11 up at the pool on the roof of our Patong Mansion hotel, where we liked to enjoy the sundown from the lip of the waterfall pool there.

Sea Fun Divers had only booked a baker's dozen of divers on the trip. Dive groupings were made in teams of two to four divers. Bobbi and I were concerned at first about the other divers we were paired with but on the 2 hour trip to the site we got to talking to them and our concerns evaporated (they seemed to know what they were doing). Meanwhile our dive guide Jurgen had told us that if there was any disparity in air, since I was carrying a surface marker buoy, Bobbi and I could just carry on with our diving. In the end none of that was necessary, but it was nice to know that Jurgen was flexible enough to accommodate such contingencies, always appreciated when pairings are potentially inappropriate. Ours turned out to be fine.

Koh Bida Nok

Jurgen telling us what to expect at Koh Bida Nok

Fortunately there was a professional photographer aboard the boat, named Johan Torfason. Johan was working for an insurance company in Sweden when he decided to take a leave of absence for 6 months to try making a living at underwater photography in Thailand. One Christmas day a snorkeling boat he was on sunk in high waves and he and 35 others were rescued by sea gypsies who live in south Koh Lanta. He stayed on Lanta for a while, must have liked it but went back to Phuket, went back to Sweden, asked for another 6 months leave, was refused, so he quit and returned to Thailand and now he is the resident photographer for Sea Fun Divers. His Facebook page is here:

https://www.facebook.com/PhuketUnderwaterPhoto/

Johan asked everyone aboard, one by one, if he could take their pictures. When he came to chat us up he figured we'd be taking our own photos, and we thanked him and told him we were unlikely to want a complete set after the trip. Two things changed my mind.

The first was, as I was standing on the platform, all kitted up, about to make a giant stride into the water, I pulled my camera out and switched it on and got an error message, no memory card. This reminded me that when I was backing up photos the night before on my computer in our hotel room I had forgot to replace the memory card in the camera. Duh! I instinctively slapped my forehead. This jarred me back to the present so I left my hand where it was to hold my mask in place, and took a giant step into the water. Mai pen rai!

The second thing was, after the dives, when Johan showed everyone aboard his photos from that day in the dry cabin amidship, they were superb. He got some great shots of Bobbi and I after all. And he also got some excellent shots of the sharks many of us saw on that first dive. I had had missed an excellent chance to video black tips up close, but Johan got them, and us watching them.

These sharks were reminiscent of the black tips we used to see frequently in very shallow water at Dibba Rock in UAE, but the ones in Dibba were more evasive. These were on patrol. And Jurgen knew where they would be and manipulated our route, despite an unexpected current change that caused us to switch direction with reef on the left, not on the right as we'd been briefed, he made sure we ended up where the sharks were.

The sharks at Koh Bida Nok were the high point but there was more to see there than sharks

Turtle Rock on Koh Phi Phi Leh

Turtle Rock was kind of a set piece dive. Diving is always great, and this would be a great site if you had it to yourself, but there were many other boats all congregated on the same spot so that there were dozens of divers in the water, making it necessary for us to be micro managed, for example when a turtle was found, we had to wait our turn to come around it. Johan got some great shots though; here are just two of many :-)

We anchored for lunch and surface interval off Maya Bay, now closed with a rope across it with floats, to try and get it to come back after the depredations of so many tourists since Leonardo de Caprio made it famous as The Beach. There were dozens of boats, speedboats etc. not just dive boats, all anchored at the edge of the rope. Here is one of the islands there.

When it was time to dive we moved a few hundred meters toward the north end of Koh Phi Phi Leh and dived from there to the south. Here's Jurgen explaining the plan. 

I took this photo. All the other diving pictures on this page were from Johan's collection

We dived as a pack on this dive. Here are Bobbi and I swimming with the pack (green fins and black fins)

One of the first stunts was to have everyone swim through a tunnel. Johan had positioned himself to take pictures of all the divers passing into the tunnel. I decided to show off. These pictures, and the shark ones, are the reason I decided to buy Johan's pictures and put them here with his permission.

That's me, mask and reg back in place, disappearing down the rabbitfish hole

and completing the manouevre

One thing that I missed filming, and Johan missed it as well, in fact only I saw it ... was a huge crayfish in a cave I discovered by shining my lamp inside. It was easily as long as my arm. It looked delicious, but there you are.

Next day, after a 24 hour surface interval, it was time to say goodbye, Phuket to Penang on Firefly, in one of these birds (my picture again). This saved us two days on buses, Phuket to Surat Thani to Hat Yai, overnight and from there next day to Butterworth and Penang.