Things have been so busy for Bobbi and I since the MCO, Movement Control Order, went into effect in Penang. On March 17, when we learned it would start the following day, we went for a last walk on Penang Hill. Just before that, COVID teaching had been keeping me working more and more intensively online since giving my workshops in Thailand in January and then following those up with an eLearning course from February 20 to March 11, 2020.
Why would I mention this in a blog about diving? While details of my eLearning course were being finalized, Bobbi and I had flown to Phnom Penh for the CamTESOL conference, and on February 10, and for obvious reasons, we had booked a flight to Phuket, one way.
The departure board at Phnom Penh airport that morning was alight with red cancelled notices, mostly flights to China. But our flight was not affected and we proceeded normally to Phuket where we got a taxi and headed north, not south into Phuket proper, but this time to Khao Lak about an hour's drive north of the airport. We had heard the diving was good there.
We had booked a hotel just near Wetzone, the dive center where we had booked our dives. Casa Cool was a conveniently located place,right opposite the sprawling night market, and reasonably quiet, when the a/c was running. We were quite pleased with it. Wetzone turned out to mount a superb dive operation, with personable guides leading dives in a highly professional, yet appropriately flexible, manner. We had booked them for three days with the possibility of diving with them a 4th.
Here was the schedule of the diving we'd planned, two dives per day at ...
- Tuesday, Feb 11 - Koh Bon
- Wednesday, Feb 12 - Richelieu (Wetzone visits this place Sun / Mon and then every other day)
- Thursday, Feb 13 - Koh Tachai
Friday, tentatively, return to Richelieu, but decided we needed to leave
I don't remember exactly when I was informed by RELO Bangkok that they had announced publicly that my eLearning course would go ahead and started recruiting participants for it, but by that time I had already booked the dive trip and had made advanced payment. I had decided to run the course in Schoology and during the days we were diving I had run into problems with the finer points of Schoology and was downloading manuals to my cell phone and reading them on the boat between dives. That got me over the technical issues but I had agreed to start the courses on Monday Feb 17. Diving three days in Khaolak through Feb 13 meant flying to Bangkok the 14th and landing in Penang via Kuala Lumpur around midight that nightt, so I'd be unable to work solidly on the course.until the morning of the 15th, after a night's sleep. This was one of the reasons we decided not to dive a 4th day with Wetzone, even though it would be on Richelieu Rock, their best dive site, which would unfortunately have got me home only two days before I was supposed to begin the course. By 'decide' I mean we made up our minds and booked our return ticket from Phuket to Penang on Feb 14 just two days before the flight after our return from Richelieu Rock. In the end RELO Bangkok postponed the start of the course to Feb 20,thereby relieving the pressure aggravated by their late announcement and my having taken advantage of there having been no announcement by squeezing in a dive holiday, so in the end I had sufficient preparation time.
That was the main reason we had decided to forego our tentative booking for the last day of diving (dive bookings not paid for in advance are by definition tentative, though it appears we could have gone had we wanted). Other reasons were that we were there just days after an unusually large full moon, causing high tide changes and strong currents that were compromising the pleasure in our diving; and if that was bringing up any big fish, it was bringing up a lot of particles in the water, and the visibility was too poor for us to see very far off the reef. Richelieu Rock was known to have manta rays, and when we were anchored there, we could see some kind of rays jumping in the waters around us, but we never saw them on the dives. Finally diving is getting very expensive in Thailand, over $150 per person per day. By day three we had been on the three sites Wetzone was visiting at that time of year. Given the need to return to business and the unfavorable currents and visibility, it didn't seem worhwhile to toss another $300 into the hat based on what we had experienced thus far.
Meanwhile, let's keep in mind where we are ...
Wednesday, Feb 12 - Richelieu
So, now it's time to show you what we saw. As we've brought up Richelieu, a dive site that we were told was named by Jacques Cousteau for the captain of his boat when he had been the first to dive it. However, this according to Wikipedia, is "demonstrably false".
Find the more likey explanations here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richelieu_Rock
Let's have a look at what we saw there. We did two dives, the first having the most current, so we pretty much rushed through that one. You can see in the videography that I am having trouble keeping the camera steady. The sites were teeming with fish life and I was particularly interested in the jacks, large, sleek fish in the family Carangidae, that were almost always present, and I trained my camera mostly on them. There was also a seahorse on the seabed in the first of the dive. You can see, though, that the vis was poor (by clicking on the button below).
The second dive was better, more sheltered from the current, and more relaxed. I videod over a third of the hour we spent underwater. We saw the same parade of jacks as before, but I was more easily able to swim in amongst them, and I had the leisure of looking under rocks on this dive, where I found barracudas and crayfish lurking in overhangs and lairs. Thanks to the improved conditions, I had time to pan my camera on the scorpion fish, and spend some time with the batfish at the end of the dive.
Tuesday, Feb 11 - Koh Bon
Koh Bon was where we went on our very first two dives with Wetzone. Many people dived the sites around Khao Lak by going into dive shops that would line you up with dive outfits according to where they were going when you wanted to go. Therefore the clientele on the boats changed from day to day depending on who the clearninghouse shops had booked for that day. We were a little unusual in that we had selected Wetzone based on its reviews and booked to dive with them in advance by paying half up front, before we got there. That way we could select a hotel in the vicinity of the shop.
It didn't matter where you stayed though because Wetzone sent a tuk tuk around each monring to collect everyone booked on the dives that day. On these rides we got a tour of the area. We got in the gates of some very impressive and remote resorts isolated from the madding crowd in the center of town. Down one back road we came out on a boxing school, active each morning with dozens of boxers paired off in rings or working at punching bags. A prim young lady joined our tuk tuk there the first day and the next. It turned out that she was enrolled at the school. She must have had a story that would make her decide to do that, pretty girl in the midst of all those men.
We were also joined that first morning (and the next) by a trio of Brits, one of whom had an incessant cough and sniffles that she spewed over everyone else in the back of the van at close quarters. In tuk tuks the benches line the sides and everyone coughs toward the center. She wrote it off as "just a British cold" but we had been taking precautions ever since our arrival in Thailand in mid January. We had masks and wore them on the tuk tuks as we did at airports and on planes, but of course we understood that the lady with the cough was the one putting everyone at risk. The pandemic was upon us, millions were about to die, and this would be our last dive trip for a while. Once safely back in Malaysia, we would not be able to fly anywhere but home to the USA, and once there would not be able to return to Malaysia until the pandemic blew over. We had acquaintences on Malaysia my Second Home visas who were in Thailand in mid March and are still there, almost in June now, unable to return to their residences, dependent on others to feed their pets.
Back to the dives; according to the Wikipedia article cited earlier, Koh Bon was as far north as Jacques Cousteau actually got when he came to this area in hopes of getting permission to enter Burmese waters, which he was ultimately denied, so he turned back and missed Richelieu, according to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richelieu_RockI've combined the video snippets from both dives on Koh Bon into one 14 minute video here. One reason for that is that the first dive had a bit of current making it hard to zoom in close on the critters, and so I didn't take all that much video. The second dive was calmer and toward the end became very relaxed with lots of big and little fish swirling in juxtaposition, creating tableaux that were quite mesmerizing. Be sure you stay right to the end, of fast-forward there, to catch the school of barracuda we saw at the end of that dive.
Thursday, Feb 13 - Koh Tachai
On our last day of diving, we visited the third dive site in Wetzone's weekly rota while the seas were still feeling the effects of the super moon from just a few days before. You can tell the current was strong from how we are using reef hooks at the beginning, and from the jerky camera motions and the way I don't linger over the animals as I lose purchase in the current. You can see it from the ripple in the anenomes, and from people finning and going nowhere. Also the fish behave differently in the current. The batfish like to ride flat in the water when the current is strong, and you can see one of them drifting off position even in that configuration, then regaining ground with a flip of his tailfin.
Full disclosure, the video with me deploying my reef hook was actually the last one on my camera for this dive, but I put it at the beginning to give viewers an indication of what we would be dealing with on this dive.
There's not much remarkable in the sealife observed here, just the constant beauty of the marine environment. I'm particularly fascinated with the submission of the occasionally aggressive titan trigger fish and always coy batfish to the wrasse at the clearning stations.They seem to be torn between staying where they are or dealing with the large and unfamiliar creature that is moving in with outstretched camera. Eventually their concern for the latter causes them to break off their beauty treatment. That is why I sometimes write in my film credits, tongue in cheek, that "Some animals may have been slightly inconvenienced but none were harmed during the creation of this epic documentary".
The last dive of our trip to Khaolok and sadly our last dive in the pre-covid era now upon us, on Koh Tachai with Wetzone Divers, was about to transpire. You can tell from the videos that either we were in a more sheltered place and / or the current had abated, and we were having a more relaxing time of it. One feature of this dive was the swirling fish balls. There were plenty of fish around, but not so many jacks, and these tended to be near the surface easing in and out of the batfish hanging out there. Speaking of batfish, there were plenty of cleaning station antics on this dive. It was a long dive as I recall, and a pleasant way to end our three days diving around Khaolak.
And at this writing, we are stuck in Penang, with no prospects to go anywhere in the near future. Interstate travel in Malaysia is banned without permits, which I doubt we could get if we just wanted to go diving on Tioman or Redang, or Perhentian. On the up side,it's just as hard to get into Penang, which is doing well in corona virus terms, as long as it makes it hard for tourists to flood back here. We feel relativey safe here, but hunkered down for the duration.
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