White Rock and Twins
14th November, Koh Tao, Thailand
After yesterday's shocking - albeit brief - downpour, I woke this morning hoping for some better weather for snorkelling and diving. We got it. A quick look out of the bungalow/cabin door and through to the palm-fringed beach revealed a glorious day with very few clouds in the sky. In no time at all, Manda and I were making our way down the sandy track with our mask, snorkels and fins to check out the reef that runs parallel to the beach.
We spent about an hour bobbing around in the water, watching shoals of fish feeding on what living coral was there (being in-shore and in shallow waters, this coral was showing a lot of wear and tear). Manda was disappointed about not seeing a turtle, but quite happy at not having encountered a shark; I didn't think either would be all that likely to make an appearance at this depth, but, like Manda, would have been happy to have this theory proven wrong by a hawksbill turtle.
A shoal of yellow fish feeding on the shallow corals.
On our first journey out on the dive boat two days ago, we stopped at two locations, known as White Rock and Twins (or Twin Peaks to give it the proper title). While Manda and I snorkelled, mostly sticking to the surface, 10-12 metres below us were all the other people who had come along on the same boat. Today it was my turn, though, at this same spot. I wasn't sure what to expect, because from 12 metres up it didn't look all that interesting. Sure, the other day I'd done a bit of breath-hold diving, managing to get down to 10 metres before making an about turn and heading for the surface again but this was not long enough to make any proper assessment of how good these locations would be for diving. Even so, I felt a little cheated being back here, because yesterday's weather had forced a change of location and I had originally wanted a morning dive today, rather than an afternoon one, and both of those would have meant new locations. Ah well, a dive is what you make it ...
I was buddied up with a guy called, well, Guy. He had arrived on Koh Tao just yesterday and had already secured a little bit of work as a Divemaster looking after 'fun divers' like myself. Thankfully, we did not have to follow a group of people doing training exercises - we were free to make our own way around and in our own time. The first dive was at 'White Rock'. Visibility was excellent, and we got to see a couple of moray eels as well as two scary trigger fish (the knife-weilding maniacs of the ocean).
For the second dive, we moved on to Twin Peaks. This would be my 34th dive and Guy's 100th. What better way to mark a centenary than with your first sighting of a turtle? I was so surprised that he had, as yet, not seen one of these animals, especially given that he had previously done many dives off Koh Tao, and the turtle at Twin Peaks was, for the want of a better expression, a 'resident'. But dive number 100 for Guy produced this beauty:
"Give us a hug". A turtle tries to have a bite to eat with the diving paparazzi
(me!) on his case.
Before not too long, there was a group of ten divers all hovering around the turtle, rudely intruding on his afternoon snack, with me at the forefront randomly snapping away. After that point in the dive, none of the other smaller fish we saw could really compete. The turtle had won the day.