Phuket Dive Report - Day 1

Dive Sites:

Shark Point
Anemone Reef
Koh Dok Mai

The first day of diving started out great, with a good itinerary of three great sites and calm sea conditions.  Shark Point is a series of pinnacles covered in life with an abundance of soft corals.  The first pinnacle actually breaks the surface, but the rest of the pinnacles are all submerged.  A typical dive profile is to drop in on the north side of Pinnacle 1, then follow the pinnacle to the other side and keep heading south to Pinnacle 2.  Our plan was to go slow and see how far we got on Pinnacle 1.  Most of the dive groups sped through pinnacle 1 and got to pinnacle 2.  Since I hired Marcia as my DM for the entire trip, we were able to dictate our own pace for the dives.  It was money well spent.  Marcia learned I like nudibranchs (along with other small life) so she kept her eyes open.  Unfortunately, no nudibranchs were spotted, but lots of soft corals and a nice blackspotted puffer, along with many of the usual tropical reef suspects. (Too darn many to mention, besides the fact that I don't know all of them.)   Unfortunately, no sharks were spotted at Shark Point.  But it was a great start to the trip.  Total Dive Time:  53 minutes  Maximum Depth:  22.6 msw   Average Depth:  13.0 msw.

The second dive of the day was Anemone Reef.  This is a similar site to Shark Point, except instead of an abundance of soft coral, the site is almost completely covered in anemones.  (Never would have guessed that, would you?)  On this dive we actually spotted a couple nudibranchs, along with a nice black blotched porcupinefish, and some moray eels.  The anemones are home to many anemonefish such as the clownfish we all know and love as "Nemo."  The most common of these I noticed was the skunk anemonefish.  At a few spots in the dive, I found myself simply hovering over the anemones watching the fish dart in and out of their "homes."  What a scene.  I noticed on this dive that my camera battery was starting to get low.  Not a good thing, given that my spare battery was back at the guest house.  Total Dive Time: 56 minutes   Maximum Depth:  18.5 msw   Average Depth:  10.9 msw

After a nice lunch and hour-long surface interval, the boat motored over to Koh Dok Mai.  This is a small island that has a sloping reef on one side and a wall on the other.  The side to dive depends slightly on current and mostly on taste.  I happen to really enjoy wall dives, so we chose the wall side.  We dropped in and found the sloping sandy reef that meets the bottom of the wall at around 20 msw.  We checked around a bit, then headed deeper in search of bamboo sharks said to frequent the sand a bit deeper than the wall.  Did we find them?  Of course not.  So we headed back to the wall and started searching for cool stuff in the nooks and crannies.  One cool feature of this wall is a cavern near one end.  We headed into the cavern and turned around to look out into the blue ocean.  It was a very cool view.  We headed out of the cavern and started up the wall some more.  Marcia managed the dive well, starting deep and heading shallower in order to extend the dive time.  We spotted an amazingly cool nudibranch, Ocellate Phyllidia, Phyllidia ocellata (See the picture below.) and many other nudibranchs.  But if you remember from the previous paragraph, my camera battery was getting low.  By the middle of this dive, the camera battery was completely dead!  Since we kept seeing cool nudibranchs, I was incredibly bummed.  But I knew we'd be back to this dive a few times and figured we could find the nudies again.  Then the unthinkable happened.  (Well, not really, I just always wanted to say that.)  Marcia spotted a ghost pipe fish!  It was beautiful!  And I didn't have a camera.  Many of you from Puget Sound might recognize this as similar to Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker Syndrome.  You know how it goes:  You see a PSL and something goes wrong. Your camera floods, your drysuit springs a leak, you get lost from your dive buddy.  Well, we saw the ghost pipe fish AFTER the battery failure rather than before.  Anyway, back to the story.  As we're hovering, checking out the ghost pipe fish, doing the GPF Dance, I spotted what looked like a broken piece of coral floating in the water column.  Marcia had already spotted it.  It was ANOTHER ghost pipe fish.  The first GPF was black with reds and oranges.  The second GPF was black with a white outline.  Wow, what an incredible start to the day of diving.  And no pictures to prove it.   Oh well.  I saw them.  Marcia saw them.  We finished the dive and surfaced to high fives and "woohoos!"  Total Dive Time:  57 minutes  Maximum Depth:   24.9 msw  Average Depth:  12.9 msw.

Pictures are below.  Click on the image to see a larger version.