Diving, diving, and more diving

So I booked a liveaboard for 4 days and 4 nights on the MV Andaman. Basically what was required out of us was to dive, eat, sleep, and dive. The first two days were to start with wake up at 6:30 followed by a dive at 7:30. We'd come up for some surface time in which we'd eat some breakfast. The next dive would be around 11:30, followed by lunch and usually a nap. The third dive was around 4:00 which I usually followed up with a nap and a snack. Our final dive was at 7:30 and was a night dive. The third day was to have a similar schedule except our night dive would be replaced by a cocktail/bbq. And the last day would follow the same schedule except we'd head back to the mainland after the second dive. So basically its 13 dives squeezed into an itty bitty 4 day window. To be honest I probably shouldn't have been doing all these dives with my little experience. We were diving to 30 meters where nitrogen narcoses is said to kick in and there were some pretty strong currents at times. But if you're gonna do it you might as well do it big, right?

Our first dive was an easy dive to 30m just to see some marine life and so the dive master could see where we were at with our dive skills. Luckily I wasn't the only one onboard who just got done with their open water course. Gabriel had just finished his in Koh Tau so we both had 5 dives a piece coming in and you could tell. We used our air supply a lot quicker than the others, especially when we started hitting the currents. But by the third and fourth days we had calmed down and were able to finish out the entire dives. We spent the first five dives around the Similan Islands and saw some amazing marine life. Anything from anemone fish to lionfish (Deuce Bigalow), moray eels, trumpet fish, angelfish, banner fish, butterfly fish, parrot fish, stingrays and much more. The best way for me to describe it to someone who hasn't dove before is that its like swimming in an exotic aquarium except these fish aren't trapped in a tank. Some of the fish made you think 'man, I need to watch Finding Nemo again to tell them what they did wrong' while others made you think 'damn, you'd look good on my dinner plate.' The best was the first dive of the second day when we came across a sleeping leopard shark. Watch the video Horst took while he swims away.

We then went to the island of Koh Bon and Koh Tachai for our second and third dives of the day. The highlight of those dives were these huge batfish that were just chillin at their cleaning stations just getting their pedicures (do fish have toes?). The next day we headed off to Koh Chi where I saw my first sea turtle! It moved so slowly yet effortlessly. I thought it was headed out to sea when it turned back and did another circle through us. Horst took another good video of this as well. By the way my dive group consisted of 3 Germans and me so when they decided to talk quickly it was in German and I was basically in Mars somewhere so that was fun. Ok, back to the diving. Our last day was at what is said to be the best dive site in Thailand: Richelieu Rock. It had an abundant amount of marine life but unfortunately the visibility was not so good. But it was still fun and while we were coming up on our final dive we got to swim alongside a school of barracuda. Mmmm, tasty. All along everyone was secretly hoping to see a whale shark or manta ray that occasionally visit these waters but that wasn't the case this trip. Hopefully with more exotic sites I'll run across one of these massive creatures.