After a two-hour boat ride going over 8-foot swells THE ENTIRE TIME, we finally made it to the calmer, reef-protected area of the ocean near the Blue Hole.
...and get our gear together to do two more dives before the wedding! (You're not supposed to dive 24 hours before flying so this was our last day to dive!)
Five minute safety stop. (Hanging out at depth of 20 feet to allow any excess absorbed gasses to be released from my blood before the final ascent to the surface).
I made a reservation to go scuba diving when we checked into the hotel the previous night. A little after nine, we walked down the road from our hotel to the dive shop.
And here's me, laughing about how during the night dive one of my instructors was banging on their tank underwater to get my attention (you can't talk underwater so when you want to get someone's attention, you tap on your tank with a dive knife) and when I turned around, I almost freaked out because out of the blackness of the water, my torch-beam illuminated a HUGE NAPOLEON fish that was within arms-length of face!
Check it out! Here's what the Blue Hole looks like shot from space! It's also considered to be one of most fatal diving spots on the planet (so I figured what better place to get my deep diving certification!).
"The Blue Hole is notorious for the number of diving fatalities which have occurred there earning it the sobriquet, "World's Most Dangerous Dive Site" and the nickname "Diver's Cemetery". The site is signposted by a sign that says "Blue hole: Easy entry". Accidents are frequently caused when divers attempt to find the tunnel through the reef (known as "The Arch") connecting the Blue Hole and open water at about 52 m depth. This is beyond the PADI recreational diving limit (40 m) and nitrogen narcosis begins to have an influence. Divers who miss the tunnel sometimes continue descending hoping to find the tunnel farther down and become increasingly narced."
I spent my safety stop swimming around on top of a shallow reef. Found another pink skunk clownfish hanging out in an anemone! As I swam around, in the distance I spotted...
...another very large Titan triggerfish! This is what they look like when they're not about to attack. See his top dorsal fin in the back? That's always up in the air like that, but when they're hostile, they have another little fin that appears in front of that fin that pops up! And when you see that, you better get away lest you want to part with a quarter-sized chunk of flesh!
For our second dive, we went to White Rock, which is a much shallower reef that's closer to Koh Tao. The visibility wasn't anywhere near as clear as Chumphon Pinnacle, but it was still pretty great. On my way down, I swam by the same exact fish I saw on my first dive!
Beyond having an underwater mountain, the dive site is most famous for its water visibility - you can see up to 60 meters in the water there! - and for its teeming underwater life. According to one dive site I was reading:
You can find bull sharks, groupers, remoras, grey reef sharks, leopard sharks and other large fish in the deeper areas. Gamefish such as sailfish, swordfish and cobias are regularly spotted as well. The shallower areas of the pinnacle is covered in purple, pink and red anemones. Clownfish, schools of bannerfish, yellow box fish and surgeonfish will greet you when you are doing your safety stop at eight meters deep.
I had high expectations for Chumphon Pinnacle, and the site did not disappoint! The site gets its name from a huge mountain that rises up out of the depths. The mountain's "peak" starts about 15m (~45" feet) below the surface and continues down to 40m (~120" feet) and the mountain sits right on the edge of a continental shelf that drops off thousands of feet!
...and like I said before, the pinnacle did not disappoint. Here's a picture of me following one of the divemasters in a descending spiral around the mountain. Check out how many fishes there are! And if you look into the background you can see thousands more!
This is one of my favorite photos - we're down about 45m (~150" feet) and the two divers are floating above the dropoff of the continental shelf and staring down into what looks like an endless blue abyss. Every time I swim over an edge and look down into the deep, I get vertigo for a couple of seconds. One of the craziest feelings in the world. Scuba diving moments like this are the closest you can come to feeling like you're in space without leaving the planet.
After our max depth, we slowly started making our ascent back up around the mountain. I was feeling peaceful and relaxed, slowly swimming next to the reef admiring all the colors and fishes and then when I looked down, I saw my first "real" shark. And by "real" I mean a shark that looks just like a shark that you see on a National Geographic special that's big enough to harm you in the unlikely event it decided to bite you. Trying to calm my shaking hands, I descended to get a little closer and busted out my camera to try to get a movie!
No matter how many times you tell your rational brain that a shark doesn't really pose all that much of a risk, there's no stopping your limbic system from reacting. I'm surprised you can't hear the sound of my heart pounding against my ribcage in this video. The shark is a gray reef shark. And he was probably about 5' or 6' feet long.
Profile shot sans flash (which is why the colors are less vibrant). Right after I snapped this photo, I heard a my divemaster frantically banging his tank with his dive knife. Since you can't speak underwater, if you want to get someone's attention, you usually will bang something metal (a carabiner, a dive knife, etc). It took me a while to locate where the sound was coming from (sound travels differently through water and it makes it impossible for humans to use their two ears to pinpoint the source of a sound), so I was slowly turning around scanning to see what he wanted to show me, and as I turned around I found myself face to face with a very large, very angry, male, Titan triggerfish!
Triggerfish as usually harmless, but their very territorial and if you swim through the "cone" that they consider theirs, they raise a fin on their back that points at you, signaling that they are about to attack. When they do this, you simply swim on your back and kick your fins at them as you swim out of their territory. Usually, a triggerfish will take a half-hearted nip at your fish and then swim away.
But not this guy! After surprising me, I barely had time to get my fins up in front of me before his first chomp. As he circled around for another go at me, I kept swimming away as fast as I could. He made three or four more passes at me, biting my fins each time! I swam over next to my dive master and despite the fact that we were now at least a hundred meters away from his territory, he was still attacking us! My divemaster was equally perflexed and after the 10th or 11th attack, we both decided to cut our dive short by 10 minutes or so and surface.
But if you have the proper filters on your lens, or if you use Photoshop (like I do) to filter out some of the blue light, the rest of the colors magically emerge and then your photos look identical to what the human eye sees while underwater. Check out these awesome Pink Skunk Clownfish hiding out in their little anemone nest!
The deeper underwater you go, the more the colors change because the colors that have shorter wavelengths get filtered out by the water. So when you take photos down deep, they tend to look very blue and washed out.
Here's a close up of a reef where you can see just how colorful and alive it is See those things that look like yellow and blue brushes? That's how the coral eats! It uses all those brushes to capture microscopic organisms in the water. If you swim close to the coral and make sudden movements with your hand, all of those brushes will get instantly retracted back into the rock and disappear! It's crazy!
...but as we swam away from the island a bit out into the open water, the visibility improved greatly. Check out the size and brightness of this beautiful butterflyfish!
This second shoal was much, much larger than the first I'd swam through. Even after snapping a bunch of photos, I still had time to switch to movie mode and film this!
My dive was awesome, but for some reason the flash on my camera wasn't firing which meant that any attempt to take a photo underwater turned out like this. Blarg!
I had been swimming around what I thought was a big underwater coral formation, but when I surfaced, I realized what I thought was a reef was just a huge karst island that continued underwater!
Parrotfish! These guys are really neat. They spend most of their time munching algae that grows on coral. They swim right up to the coral and you can hear them munching and crunching underwater and they scrape the reef!
When this guy puffs himself up, he has a bunch of prickly spikes that stick out. If you look closely, you can see the spikes lying flat against his body behind his fin!
Ok, now that I've shown you all the nice guys I met - it's time to see the SCARY GUYS! The first scary guy wasn't all THAT scary because he was sleeping! Sleeping shark! (Nurse shark, I think).
After resting for a bit after my first dive (you have to wait for your body to aspirate out the excess nitrogen that it's accumulated while diving or you can get Decompression Sickness - aka, The Bends) I was ready for my second dive. This time, I remembered to snap lots of pics! Here's a bannerfish!
