Scuba Diving in the Surins: Day 1

This past weekend Tim and I decided to get the hell out of Dodge (well, Bangkok) during Thailand's recent elections and do some scuba diving.  We'd heard that Thailand's scuba diving is generally only so-so compared to that of Indonesia, with the exception of the Surin and Similan islands, two small groups of islands in the Andaman Sea off Thailand's west coast, north of Phuket and close to the Burmese border.  At Scuba Steve's urging, we decided to book a 3-day liveaboard to the Surins and Richelieu Rock with Wicked Diving.  Good thing, too, as both the diving and the folks at Wicked were lovely.  I'm planning my next trip back already (well, not reeeeeally, but if any friends/family visit Thailand and insist on a liveaboard, I could be very easily convinced).

So here's the video, photos and description of the first day of our trip with Wicked (you can read Wicked's trip report here, too)...  Friday night we boarded the boat, ate a great meal, got our equipment ready for the next day's early morning dive, and tried to settle in our cabins as the boat lurched (oy, seas were rough that night!) towards the Surin Islands. 

Early Saturday morning we got up and headed out on our first dive, joined by divemaster Dan (you'll see him rocking the yellow snorkel in the videos), fellow diver Jun (blue fins and a camera).  Dive #1, Ao Pakkad, which was relaxing, pretty, and full of schools of sparkly little glass fish.  Sometimes they covered the reef like a blanket and you had to basically sweep them aside to see the other critters!  Also: very curious/friendly tall-fin batfish that alternated between zipping around, sneaking up on you from behind and generally hanging about.

Highlights of the below video:

•  glass fish, glass fish and more glass fish
• one of the many tall-fin batfish stalking fellow diver Jun at 0:18
• lots of lionfish (at 0:46, 4:10)
• Tim reluctantly waving (1:22)
• scorpionfish, master of disguise... see if you can spot him at 1:26
• cute little sea star at 1:51
• 2 morays, 1 rock at 2:59 (and below)

• lobster at 3:33!
• giant clam at 3:58
• white-collar butterfly fish at 4:22
• cute anemone fish side-by-side with juvenile three-spot dascyllus at 5:11
• pretty colorblocked powder blue surgeonfish (cousin to Dory, a palette surgeonfish):

Dive #2, Torinla Pinnacle, is a big, submerged pile of granite, including some major boulders.

The currents were strong when we dove, so we had to descend while holding onto the boat's mooring line.  You can see in the video below, as we descended, we caught site of something pretty awesome: 5 absolutely enormous (like I think they for sure outweighed me and were at least 5 feet long, probably more) and endangered (and therefore rare) napoleon (also called humphead) wrasse!!  You can see them coming out of the blue over the rocks in the video at 0:13.

Other video highlights:

• yellow five-lined snapper nosing around the rocks at 0:28
• big, beautiful blue-ringed angelfish at 0:44
• bubble, bubbles, so many bubbles surrounding us as we ascended to the surface since the current was pushing all our fellow divers' exhaled bubbles up towards us

Not captured on video, but super cool:

• a white-tip reef shark swimming along the edge of the rocks
• a winged pipefish (kinda looked like a stick at first)

Dive #3 was at Koh Torinla, a lovely site.  Right off the bat?  A big 4-5 foot wide Jenkins' ray!:

I don't know why I love feather stars so much, but I do.  So pretty:

The Koh Torinla site had its fair share of curious tall-fin batfish:

 Highlights from the dive video:

• Jenkins' ray.  Woo!
• More glass fish.  Crazy amounts of glass fish, surrounding us like a living fog.
• So, so many super curious tall-fin batfish, sneaking up behind us, schooling and swimming, generally hanging out... they are the stars of this show
• A cool (and big) star pufferfish, floating out off the reef, getting a cleaning(0:32)
• Moray (0:49)
• Lobster (3:10) 
• A gang of bannerfish (3:16)
• Schools of yellow-backed fusiliers (3:42)
• Beautiful oriental sweetlips (I was definitely worried about the results I would get when typing that into Google... heh heh): I looooove the combination of polka dots and stripes in bold black, yellow and white (4:52)
• Turtle! (5:15)

Bunaken Diving Day 4

Dudes, the diving on our fourth day was pretty fabulous... relaxing, completely rife with fish, and just generally beautiful.  The videos are also by far our best of the trip, mostly because of the good lighting and camera un-shy fish.  Definitely worth watching (here's looking at you, Mom) and definitely worth watching full screen.

First dive: Again, sadly, I can't remember the name of the dive spot.

Here's the video:

Highlights(so many of them!) from the above video:

- Our descent... the light, the thousands of fish off the reef. Amazing.  I love the tiny, gorgeous orange and pink anthias.

- Tiny electric blue and yellow fish, also gorgeous (0:33)

- An absolutely ridiculous amount of pyramid butterfly fish and red tooth trigger fish swarming everywhere

- A cool close-up of the red tooth trigger fish... I love their coloring and the weird way their fins move (1:00)

- A blurry, but pretty nudibranch, doing some prairie dogging (1:10)

- A couple of masked bannerfish (1:28)

- a beautiful anemone with residents (1:45)

- more magical swarms of pyramid butterfly fish and red tooth trigger fish

- a pyramid butterfly fish getting cleaned on the reef by a couple of smaller, striped cleaner fish (you can see them circling him and kinda poking at him until they all get spooked) (2:14)

- a couple of big trevally in the distance (2:30)

- a couple long-nose butterfly fish (2:36)

- a surgeon fish of some sort (2:46)

- a couple vagabond butterfly fish  (2:54)

- surgeon fish again, plus a darkly colored trumpetfish (3:00)

-  another cool anemone and skunk anemone fish (3:09)

- a couple lattice butterfly fish (3:23)

- a fish that was eating stuff off the reef and then spitting it out (3:38)

- a blue puffer (4:05)

- so, so, so many fish on top of the reef...

Braaaaaaaiiiiiins:

Self-portrait with triggerfish:

For some reason these photos reminds me of Snorks.  Does anyone remember Snorks?  I had fond memories of the show until I just Googled it.  You can't go home again.

So much pretty coral:

View from below:

I still don't really know what these things are... some sort of sponge, I assume... I also still don't know why Scuba Steve hates them:

And neither do they, apparently:

I like turtles:

Here's our scorpion fish friend again:

For those of you who still couldn't see him after I circled him, here's an annotated close-up.  I guess he's doing his job pretty well, eh?

Giant clam!!!  I love giant clams:

Ginormous porcupinefish:

Second dive:  Blanking on the name of the dive site, again.  Oops.  Let's just call it "Awesomesauce"

Tim was the videographer on this dive (our last... boooo) and got some great footage:

Highlights:

- Ornate ghost pipe fish- woot!  First time seeing this bugger.  And he's hard to see because of his camouflage, but he's the spiky "T" shaped thing in floating on the left hand side of the crinoid  (0:12)

- Fat little puffer fish and a big titan trigger fish (0:24)

- Some weird purple thing (1:05)

-  Freaking beautiful blue girdled angelfish (1:14)

- Just the gang, hanging out (1:23)

- The world's tiniest (like smaller than your pinky nail) little yellow seahorse! You can just see him float a bit in the center of the shot. (1:34)

- Us, admiring a turtle napping in a nook in the reef (1:36)

- The highlight of the highlights:  turtle square dance! (2:19)

(check out the giant barnacle on that one turtle's butt!)

- A strangely aggressive fish, lunging at the camera (3:14)

- Tons of beautiful coral and fishies

- Our scorpion fish friend again (4:43)

- These super cute little fish (anyone know what they are called?) that hang out in the coral, diving down into it when you approach (4:52)

- A pretty parrotfish (5:34)

- Titan triggerfish, again (6:03)

- Another doofy puffer fish, chilling on an awesome brain coral... you'll notice we have a lot of footage of these guys because they're so slow moving (6:12)

- A group of pretty oriental sweetlips- look at those spots and stripes!!  (6:44)

- A ginormous porcupine fish being cleaned (you can see the cleaner fish going in and out of his gills!) (7:02)

- Dance party, obvs (7:47)

Bunaken Diving: Day 3

On the third day of diving we set out on a day trip to some of the more northerly, more remote islands within the Bunaken Marine Park, including Mantehage Island.

First dive: Barracuda Point

We were promised bigger fish at the current-y Barracuda Point, and promises were delivered.  

True to its name, within a few minutes of dropping down we saw a large school of sleek, silvery barracuda just off the edge of the reef (and we saw them again at the end of the dive, too, prompting several post-dive renditions of Barracuda on the boat).  You can see the shimmering cloud barracuda in the beginning of the video just to the left of our divemaster and again at the end of the video at the 2:00 mark.  Looked more impressive in real life... the camera doesn't do justice to far away things.

Other cool, big stuff spotted on this dive:  a school of big (and kinda ugly, honestly) bumphead parrot fish (I sense Tim was trying to film them just off the reef at the 0:43 minute mark, but they are just out of the camera's reach, see previously statement re: justice, far away) and a bunch of big-eyed trevally (yes, their eyes are big and bright yellow and a little creepy).

Small but awesome stuff seen on this dive: a blue ribbon eel (1:52- sticking up out of the sand and waving his head around, including his giant nostrils), a big old cuttlefish, schooling banner fish, red fire gobies hanging out and then darting back into their hole in unison (1:14), doofy-looking puffers (0:29 and 2:14), blue-headed tilefish, anemone fish (1:34), clown trigger fish (0:34).

Second dive:

I don't remember the name of this dive site, but do remember that we saw some nice stuff, including:

• some beautiful crinoids/feather stars at 0:30 and 1:33
• yet another blurry orangutan crab at 1:07
• a super cool (and big) green, black and orange nudibranch at 1:23
• a lobster: you can see his long white antennae sticking out of the rocks at 1:35
•  a banded snake eel (or was it a highly poisonous sea snake?), which you maaaaay catch it for a hot second at minute mark 1:38, but only if you have good eyes and know where to look... that sucker was fast and my batteries were low

By the time we got to the third dive (at Banga), our camera batteries were shot, so no photo or videos, sadly.  But we did see some cool stuff:

• trumpetfish
•  school of fusiliers
• schooling banner fish
• big porcupine fish
• giant clams
• blue spotted fantail stingray
• more red tooth trigger fish
• tomato anemone fish
• regal angelfish
• tons of pyramid butterfly fish
• longnose butterfly fish
• nudibranch

Bunaken Diving: Day 1

Aiiiight, here we go: underwater footage!! Woot!

Please excuse the shaky-cam, occasional hand-in-shot, and the general blurriness of the photos.  Some of that is due to inexperience filming underwater, and some (at least on the first day) is due to quickly changing currents (up! down! hard left!  no, no, no, hard right!), low visibility (lots of floaties, as you'll see) and whatnot.  The photos and video get better as the days go on, I promise, due to both experience and improved conditions!

Also chalk some of the camera shake up to my flappy scuba hands... while diving I have trouble preventing my arms from moving as if I am treading water.  When I saw that Colleen did the same thing, I decided it was an ex-competitive swimmer thing and felt a little less silly about my bad habit.  We could both use a lesson from Scuba Steve, who always has his hands clasped calmly in front of him.

Steep walls are what Bunaken is known for... walls of coral that start at 3 meters deep and dramatically go straight down, up to 600 meters (see how steep they are above).  They're pretty crazy. When you're floating 20 meters down and you look down at your feet floating above the blue abyss, it gives you a weird feeling like you might fall in it, but you continue to hover, neutrally buoyant. 

Our first dive was at Lekuan 3, a steep wall with lots of crevices and ledges.  The currents on this dive were a little erratic... not too too strong, but ever-changing, which was confusing at times.  Back and forth, up and down.  But we did see lots of fish... big schools red-tooth triggerfish (beautiful teal fish with funky propeller-like fins and large, pointy vampire fangs), lionfish, beautiful coral, schools of pyramid butterfly fish, sea turtles...

Our second dive was at Muka Kampung (in front of the village, literally), and was lovely.  Again, schools of triggerfish and butterfly fish, more turtles, teeny little (smaller than a quarter) orange, hairy orangutan crabs (blurry photo above), a squat lobster, regal angelfish, moorish idols, stonefish, anemone shrimp, nudibranches...

Check out the video below from our first two dives.  Highlights include: me awkwardly putting the red filter cap on halfway through (it's supposed to help show true colors underwater where the red in the color spectrum is absorbed), turtles!, me and Colleen peace sign posing, flapping triggerfish, a bannerfish in a big sponge...:

The third dive of the day was just Tim and Scuba Steve...  Colleen and I took the afternoon off to chill out (regretting it a bit I would have hit the 50 dive milestone if I joined!). They tell me the dive was pretty amazing, and the video backs up their story... it looked like an aquarium.  Massive schools of shiny blue-striped fusiliers, more triggerfish and pyramid butterfly fish, more turtles, batfish, trumpetfish, puffers, sea cucumbers...  you name it.  Video and pics below...

Video highlights include Tim torn between pointing the camera at a turtle and following two big batfish that swam into frame.  Also, the cool shot with different schools of fish (fusiliers in the background, pyramid butterfly fish and others in the foreground) swimming past each other just off the edge of the reef and then simultaneously getting freaked:

 

 

Mr. Turtle says, "More to come!"