Vance's Dive bLogs: Fun diving off Phuket on King Cruiser Wreck, Shark Point, and Koh Dok Mai wall with Local Dive Thailand

Logged Dives #1596-1598 February 22, 2019

Bobbi and I haven't been diving since we were on Tioman last September (http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2018/09/diving-from-salang-tioman-malaysia-with.html), so we were itching to get down and get wet. Our choice of dive location, meaning where on the globe, was governed mainly by ease of access in and out of the area. Having just come from the CamTESOL conference in Phnom Penh we were considering diving off Sihanoukville in Cambodia, something I think we'll want to do at some point given the novelty of the sites there and the low cost of travel in Cambodia, but working out the time it would take to travel overland (from Siem Reap, which is where we were when making our plans) vis a vis the low cost of air fares in and out of Phuket from Cambodia and onward to where we live in Penang, we chose Phuket as our base for diving this time around.

It wasn't our first time to visit there. I dived in Phuket in my early pre-logged dive days way last century, but it's been some decades again since our trip to the Similan Islands which the four of us in our family reached on a liveaboard from Phuket in around 1990 (when Phuket was relatively cheap and not so built up), and its been a few years since we dived Koh Lanta, which brought us up to the southern reaches of Koh Phi Phi diving (http://vancesdiveblogs.blogspot.com/2014/12/bobbi-and-i-on-holiday-fun-diving-on.html). So we thought we'd give Phuket a go, for convenience and for old times sake.

Here is a map of our diving from Phuket Feb 22, 23, and 24, 2019,
https://www.screencast.com/t/YufC3nOPd0

Annotated after borrowing, with attribution, from this web page

http://www.phuket.com/diving/divingsites/phiphiisland.htm

Why we chose Local Dive Thailand for our first dive this century from our base in Phuket

We chose to dive today with Local Dive Thailand, who graciously offered me a professional discount and matched Bobbi and I with one of their best dive leaders, Born. The program for the day was one of the Phuket set pieces: King Cruiser Wreck, Shark Point, and Koh Dok Mai wall. There were about 35 divers on the boat and a dozen staff, or about 47 people in the water on each dive site from our boat alone. Though there were also divers from other boats as well, Born managed to ingeniously conduct our dives so that we were detached from the mobs and felt almost as if we were diving alone.

King Cruiser Wreck

Here are the videos I made from the first dive on King Cruiser Wreck (use this link if the embed doesn't work):
https://youtu.be/hWbBW0XkkDc

In this dive the overriding consideration was deco time. It can be a deep dive down to 32 meters, but we planned to take it only to 24 so as to not be annoyed by deco problems on the remaining two dives. We planned to surface when we reached 7 minutes no deco time and after achieving depth we were constantly easing upward, chasing our computers against the agreed upon limit (or at least I was, mine being more conservative than Bobbi's). Consequently we were back on the line after 35 minutes diving, but we saw a lot of the wreck and its resident creatures.

In the video you can see that we encountered several lion fish, swirling schools of yellow snappers, a big grouper, a fishball devouring a jellyfish, some large fish I think were mackerel, a concealed scorpion fish, a moray eel, and picturesque whip and colorful soft corals. It was overall a pleasant dive, but the best was yet to come.

Shark Point

The next dive was Shark Point, or No Shark Point as Born called it. She said there had been no sharks at that site for the last several years. As I mentioned earlier, Bobbi and I were just happy to be diving again, and this is what we saw (use the direct link if the video embed doesn't work):

https://youtu.be/b9DlPJ_OF48

In this video we descend on a nest of blue spotted sting rays and watch them abruptly change locations. We encounter lots of schooling fish, clowns, a couple of cowries on the seabed, and an orange ghost pipefish which is hard to see, partly due to my videography vs. midwater buoyancy control and inability to see clearly where I'm pointing the camera. This is followed by video snippets of various morays, schools of fish enjoying a jellyfish dessert, crabs in the anemones, more schooling fish, several ominously lurking scorpion fish, gorgonian fan corals, a bemusing cuttlefish, some lion fish, a school of large barracuda, more anemone crabs, more jellyfish abuse, a HUGE scorpion fish resting on a barrel coral, a puffer, more barracudas, a green seahorse that I couldn't see and didn't know what I was filming till the very end of the clip, more lion fish, and even more barracudas and other fish at the safety stop. This was our favorite dive of the day.

Koh Dok Mai

Our final dive of the day was on Koh Dok Mai, on the dark side of the wall. Here's the video (and at this link in case of problems with the embed): https://youtu.be/JNFl8ev6Q50

The video begins with our lamps eluminating a free swimming moray on the dark side of the wall, a seahorse, a peek under a coral outcrop where there were 3 bamboo sharks that Born knew in advance would be there, a little eel that bites (Born demonstrated, and I mimicked; I can still feel the sensation of tiny teeth), a ghost pipe fish, more white-eyed eels, some glass shrimp, another swimming eel, schooling fish, a trigger fish, fan coral, a couple of nudibranchs, a couple more eels, a scorpion fish, and Born being surprised by a sea snake while showing us yet another grinning scorpion fish on the safety stop. The end of the video shows us surfacing to the beauty of Koh Dok Mai halfway between Chalong harbor and the Phi Phi islands.

Overall impressions

Local Dive Thailand were a great outfit to dive with. They have their own boat, they conducted the trip competently, and there was a dive guide for every two to four customers, or maybe just three. The only problem was that they over-feed you on the trip :-). There's breakfast on the long journey out from Phuket halfway to Koh Phi Phi and something to eat between dives. The second surface interval is accompanied by a filling meal of delicious Thai food. And on the way back, if you can still consume more, there were pancakes. There was always watermellon and other fruits, and free flow tea coffee.

A few days later I saw their boat off Koh Phi Phi and snapped a picture of it there