Diving the Cham Islands

Fishing nets and a tourist boat in Hoi An harbor.

While in Hoi An, Tim and I decided to take a day trip to the Cham Islands (a group of 8 sparsely populated islands off the coast) for some scuba diving.  The weather was not ideal (it had rained the day before and was still drizzling as we headed out on the boat), but the scenery was nice anyway. 

Cloudy skies.

We were required to wear our lifevests on the dive boat as we left the harbor... but not on the rest of the trip or on the way back in.  Hmmm.

The turtle-shaped island where we did our first dive.

 Cham Island Diving seemed to be French-owned, or at least managed, so many of the Vietnamese boat crew spoke French to us, which was kinda funny.  It was particularly interesting  when the water was rough and we were trying to get back on a small boat from shore- the boat was being lifted up and subsequently dropped about 8 feet with each wave, all while we were trying to climb aboard.  The crew was yelling at us quite emphatically,  "Allez, allez!!!" and "Asseyez toi!!"  I understood what they were saying, recalling my high school French, but I think some of the Aussie divers were a little confused.

Fishing boats in the harbor at Cham Islands.

Difficult to see here, but these were big military gunner boats, trolling the Vietnamese coast, perhaps because of Vietnam's tension with China over the South China Sea?

I didn't get any underwater photos this time, as it was just me, Tim and our French dive instructor and none of us had underwater cameras.  We did see some cool stuff underwater, though:

• hundreds and hundreds of brightly colored "Christmas tree worms," which we have decided must be the inspiration for some of the plant life in the movie Avatar.
• a moray eel that was black and white spotted
• several different kinds of shrimp
• white nudibranch with black spots
• all sorts of starfish: lots of blue seastars, a couple granulated seastars, and a couple crown-of-thorns
• some cute hermit crabs
• a couple boxfish 
• a puffer fish
• several lion fish
• a bunch of pink skunk anemone fish
• a school of barracuda (we think)
• whip coral
• a ton of sea cucumbers
• angelfish
• giant sea urchins