3. Living aboard Motor Vessel Pawara and surviving the ‘green monsters’!

5 days and 4 nights aboard MV Pawara; 20 divers, 5 dive guides, 10 boat staff & and 14 dives on offer around the Similan Islands and Surin National Park. We set sail at about 8pm with ‘fire sticks’ and bangers lit as we left port as part of the Thai ritual to bring luck to the boat, which also includes it being blessed and having flower garlands on its bow to keep us all safe. There are a diverse range of nationalities amongst the divers (American, German, Belgian, Albanian, Lichtensteinian (not sure that’s word!), Singaporean (or that!), Chinese, Hungarian,Korean and of course Thai. The boat manager is called Vinnie and he’s the only other Brit onboard. He’s safety first and a good trip organiser but is definitely someone the misogynistic, inappropriate, often uncomfortably sexual references and comments and mildly racist ‘jokes’ culture left behind by the 90s. He’s lived in Thailand for 10 years and says he’ll likely never return to the UK. I’ve told him I think that’s probably wise as I don’t think his views and ‘hilarious’ ways of speaking to people would be accepted anymore. He told me it’s about freedom of speech and he can say what he wants. I agreed that he should stay in Thailand! Aside from that, he’s a good guide and has kept us all safe and tried to make sure we’ve all had some good dives! He has hugely protected the length of time we all get to dive for by organising us into strict groups according to experience and air consumption.

I am diving in group number 1 with Jerome (around 55, from Belgium) and Kent (73 from USA). I keep accidentally calling him Clark like some weird Mallet’s Mallet word recognition game but he doesn’t seem to mind and has said he’s also happy to be called Superman. Both of them have around 1000 dives! We’re the group that always go into the water first then usually come out last. Our guide is Thai,he’s called Chalee (pronounced Charlie) and had been diving here for over 20 years as a guide! So far, I’ve done 7 dives (I didn’t do the night dive last night because it was ever so dark and I don’t like that when I was told we would mostly just be digging about in the sand looking for ‘small stuff’!). My favourite thing so far was a beautiful octopus who was out and sitting on a rock flashing his different colours and textures for camouflage and perhaps because he knew there were cameras around! The reef octopus are absolute masters of camouflage…. This is all the same octopus just reacting to the environment around him….

My least favourite thing so far (aside from coming accidentally face-to-face with a Titan trigger monster, as we both rose up and over a rock, at the same time from different directions) has been what the local divers call ‘the green monster’. Far from being living marine life, these are some water currents called thermoclines. A thermocline is basically a layer of water between different depths of water that are at different temperatures- usually, the deeper waters are colder and you’d go through a thermocline layer to pass from warmer to cooler waters. However, this year, due most likely to global warming and the changing ocean currents etc, massive drifts of COLD water having been coming up from the deep and sweeping across shallow waters. You can see when a thermocline is coming as it is like a green haze racing towards you. On the edge, as it approaches, the water all blurs and makes you think your eyes have broken then it all clears and bloody cold water washes over you. The sea temperature is sitting around 29°. The most brutal thermocline we got caught in went down to 21°C and absolutely flew through. We had to grab onto to rocks and try to duck behind to protect ourselves from the worst of the current whistling by while getting the freeze! It’s like going from a warm bath into an ice bath with the sudden temperature drop. The current is so strong, all the corals bend right over and the rigid ones vibrate - like traffic lights in a strong gale. Land people experience a similar phenomenon; they call them winds and storms and gales! That particular green monster pinned us to the depths for around 10 minutes and was SO cold. My ears and fingers has gone numb and the cold had blaster down my wet suit and into the centre of my being! The guides said they’d never known one like it as it lasted so long. When it finally started to pass and we could let go of our anchors and swim out and up to warmer waters, it was like swimming through a magic portal into a bath!

On the boat, I am sharing a cabin with a Chinese lady called AnLi. She is an older lady (I have no idea how old but I would guess around 60. Asian people seem to look impossibly young until a certain age, when they suddenly turn quite ancient. A bit like my Mum 😂🥰). AnLi seems very able to follow instructions, look after herself and get herself to where she needs to be at the right time. She checks with me each night to make sure she’s understood the instructions for the next day. Maybe as they get older, the Chinese become more adept at life. There are also two younger Chinese girls (early 20s?) on board. They are never where they should be, forever late, incapable of listening to or following instructions and when they are late and have to be called for, they run on their tips toes in an odd exaggerated fashion! Their English is excellent. They just haven’t mastered the art of existing successfully yet. They also follow the typical younger Chinese diving practice of diving in a style that is so unsafe;  constantly bouncing up and down to significantly different depths, chasing fish with their go pros and generally irritating everyone else around them while remaining blissfully unaware and entirely unconcerned!

Our daily schedule is mostly diving, eating and having little naps. We wake up at 6am and after checking our tanks, mostly sit fairly quietly having our delicious cups of tea, or coffee (weird) or water (even weirder) to start the day as the sun rises. We did have an hour on the beach on one of the islands where we walked up to some rocks to stand and look at the view. The route was all stairs and well marked although at times, very narrow and you had to lean out against the railing to let other people squeeze by. A lot of, likely misplaced, trust in the Thai safety and construction standards was required! They had helpfully signposted and included warning of danger as they felt necessary. I’m not sure all of the signs were exactly what they want convey or that some might have been lost in translation though!

Food onboard is in almost constant supply. Breakfast always has eggs, there is always soup with lunch and dinner and a mix of Thai and western cuisine although sometimes at odd mix. Dinner today was beef masaman curry, mashed potato, roast pork, sweet and sour fried fish and a load of sautéed veg. They do at least only give out cutlery rather than chopsticks, which I am thrilled about as I haven’t quite mastered chopsticks let! There are no knives anywhere so you have to either pick up everything on your fork (including the hunks of roast pork today) and eat it off the top like it’s s lollipop or use your spoon and fork to rip apart food to make it into bite size chicks! I have also become most proficient at spreading butter on to bread with a spoon!

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Richelieu Rock

Today (Thursday) we dived Richelieu Rock - right on the boarder of Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). They claim it’s one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. It’s certainly in my ‘100 dives to do in a life time’ book - and I would agree that it has earned its place there. I shall thank my dad for that as he got me the book and I now treat it like a ‘to-do’ list that I’m working through. It was actually browsing that book a few months ago that lead me, within hours, to book this trip! I told Vinnie all about my book and how excited I was to dive this site. He changed the schedule slightly so we could arrive and dive half an hour earlier than usual and before any other boats arrive. Group no 1 was the first group into the water and on the site … oh it was magic! The site is a huge mountainous rock with crevices and valleys and pinnacles and just a couple of metres at the top that breaks the surface. There are a squillion bazillion glass fish (tiny little clear/silver fish) that school around the entire rock then a hunting pack of big fish (giant travelly, emperor fish, rainbow runners, mackerel and barracuda) that cruise around all day in joint packs darting in and out of the schools and hunting. When the glass fish tighten up their positioning and you find yourself in the centre of their school, it blocks out the sun and you can entirely lose your view of anything and get lost in amongst them! There are also endless other beauties and incredible things to see. We did 4 dives here today and each time saw something cool and different in addition. On the final dive this included a pair of harlequin shrimps who were busily hiding under a rock, eating the arm of a large seastar which they had just cut off. Apparently, they work to prepare their meals in pairs and that is their preferred diet! I also saw a few  e and 4-armed seastars!

After the final dive, we all rush off to shower (AnLi goes first because they are so rubbish on air that her group have dived, surfaced and showered before my group and I get back onboard after our dive!). Our shower is either scolding hot or air temp (which is fine because that’s around 32°C). Only about 10 of the holes in the shower head actually have water coming out of them so although the shower is also quite high pressure, you can’t turn it on fully because then it’s like 10 super sharp needles firing into your very skin!

For lunch today we had proper Thai cooked pad Thai and Poy the chef shower us how to construct and eat it properly. It was delicious! Dinner was a little more random with, pasta, rice, bolognaise, roast chicken, mash potato, tempura veg, garlic bread, tomato and mozzarella salad with pumpkin soup! Tomorrow is our final day. 6am wake up for a 6.30 morning dive, breakfast then a second dive then we sail back for the afternoon drying out our gear as we head back to port.

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Final day completed and all 13 dives of the trip were a success. I started my trip having done 187 so the final dive of the trip and today was my 200th dive! The sea treated me to an absolute show with an epic dive which included a under sea water fall (where the water crashes onto rocks and down a gulley above water then pours down into the sea below the head land), a beautiful porcupine pufferfish and also an incredible cuttlefish who let me get really close 💙. We saw all sorts of amazing things and had a brilliant final, 200th, dive. Such a treat and a lovely way to end my time with my excellent dive buddies. Just time for lunch, group photos, drying out dive gear then packing up as we headed back to port afterwards!

I am now safely back on land and checked into my beach front hotel on Kamala Beach (Phuket) ready for a few days to relax … and hopefully not be shocked awake and expected to be out of bed at 6am and into the sea by 6.45!

200th dive: