Ko Tao: California Diving in Thailand?

After a lazy morning that looked formidably cloudy for a diving day, we met at the dive shop at noon. The ocean had continued to get rougher as the morning progressed, but we had already paid and were ready for the amazing diving of Ko Tao, even if it wasn’t going to be top notch today. Our ride out to the first dive site, Hin Wong Pinnacle, was pretty rough, and the seasick meds almost failed me when we were getting our gear ready. But we made it, and giant strided about 15 feet into the rough sea below. Our dive guide told us we were going to go down using the buoy line, but we just bee-lined it to the bottom to get out of the waves.

Timo, our dive guide, had told us that the whole dive site was between 18-20 meters. We knew something wasn’t quite right when we got down to about 25 meters with no sight of the bottom (granted the visibility was about three meters, but still!). So we kicked around, obediently following our dive guide and answering his incessant “Are you okay?” questions. About five minutes into the dive, he told us to stay put and he swam up to the surface. We looked at each other and thought, “Oh great. Our dive master is lost. And we are paying for this?” He came back down a minute later, pointed us in the direction of the dive site, and we kept kicking. The problem was, Timo kept turning around to make sure we were okay, and every time he turned around, he veered off course slightly to the right. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we were quite literally swimming in circles. Our annoyance only heightened when he had to go to the surface a second time to reorient himself, and we continued to swim in circles! We swam in circles for our entire 40 minute dive, never found the dive site, and didn’t see a damn thing. To make matters worse, when we came up, we were easily a quarter of a mile from the boat. This is a big boat, the kind that doesn’t come pick up divers. We had to kick all the way back! It took forever, and on the way Timo informed us that his compass was broken and he was convinced the current had taken us all over the place. There was no current.

Back on the boat, we did our best to laugh it off and hope for better conditions on dive number two. As we headed to the second dive site, Ao Leuk, Timo asked if we had ever dove in poor visibility conditions. We both laughed out loud and said in unison, “We are from California. That’s all we have.” He was a bit taken aback at that, but oh well.

The second dive proved to be much better. Feeling bad, Timo made sure we were the first group into the water so we could have a longer dive. In the improved visibility, he managed to get us to the dive site and point out every clam he saw (about 200). It was really neat to see all the different corals that this dive site is known for: the corals literally battle for position on the ocean floor, combining forces when necessary and killing out the weaker species. It was spectacular to see all this taking its slow course of action, but the “Are you okay?” questions punctuating the beauty put a bit of a damper on the situation. We also saw a school of small barracuda that literally swam in circles around us for awhile.

At the end of our diving day, we took naps and half laughed, half fumed about the injustice of having to pay for our first dive of the day. We ate a cheap beachfront meal and watched some of the fire spinners that were able to perform on the much clearer night. We went to a few beach parties, and enjoyed a Thai “pancake” at the end of the night. It was some sort of very thin dough filled with thinly sliced apples and cinnamon and drenched in honey butter. It was delicious!