Yesterday I dived at Chumphon Pinnacle, a spire of rock jutting up from the depths a couple of miles northwest of Koh Tao. The highest point is about 14 meters below the surface. We explored the tops of the three tallest peaks - technically I'm not supposed to dive deeper than 18 meters but our instructors agreed that 20 would be all right if we were careful with our air consumption.

It's a pretty amazing place, even just at the top. The number of fish is astounding - fish I had previously seen only singly, or in pairs, turned up in schools of ten. Fish I'd seen in schools of twenty were in schools of hundreds. Feeling more comfortable with my gear, I spent a lot of the dive sideways, head down, on my back or in whatever attitude allowed me to see my surroundings best. By doing this I saw some amazing sights. Four schools of different kinds of fish, layered above me and backlit by the sun. A school of turkey-sized batfish. A sting ray hiding under a rock. At one point I swam just a few inches above a rock until I reached the cliff and as I poked my head over it I could see schools of fish swarming all the way into the murky depths. And everywhere were the umbrella-shaped bubbles of divers out of sight deep below.

The quiet waters lap the beach gently in the mornings. I walk out fifty meters before there's enough water to swim in. It's warm until you swim further out into the harbor, and then you start to feel the cooler waters just a meter below the surface. The temperature changes abruptly; this is called a thermocline. I swim out to our boat, which takes ten minutes with my lazy sidestroke. There are beautiful corals below but I can't see them when my eyes are in the water. When I look down with my head out of the water, I can almost make them out but ripples in the water steal the image away just as it's about to make sense.

I reach the boat and grab hold of the anchor line. I hoist myself onto it as though it were a swing, and then I just relax and watch the early morning harbor. A couple of longtail boats are moving about and further away, I can see one of the overnight ferries moving into Mae Hat. I can't hear it from where I'm sitting, or feel the wake. Some tiny people are eating breakfast in the beachfront restaurant next to where I entered the water. The boat turns very slowly to point into the wind. Everything is quiet and the water is a crazy kind of Cool-Aid blue and I feel like I could swim for miles - just point myself out to sea and keep swimming forever.


- posted by Joachim @ 6:37 AM