Scuba

SCUBA today! The first dive was at a rocky outcropping on the east side of Adang island. The rocks came jutting out of the water like in a pirate movie. I was really excited to SCUBA again after four months since I was certified. There were two divers, me and a new arrival on the island, a Canadian man named Darel, who is a helicopter mechanic by trade. (which means he gets to travel all over the planet, working 6 weeks on in a country and then with 6 weeks off and his job will fly him home for those weeks if he likes – very nice set up!). Besides Darel, there was Neil (our excellent leader) and the boatman Pi Bunchu.

For the dive, we dropped down on one side of the rock outcropping and swam around it with the current. Under, the surface were stair like levels of coral, and we descended to one of the lower levels and explored around. Since the water was deeper here, less was bleached than around lipe. There were some soft corals, and boulders rising off the bottom covered with interesting growths and shapes. The landscape underwater is really intriguing – in this site corals were thickly scattered among the sandy bottom. On the side of a huge purple sponge I found a lionfish tucked against the current, when we got close he flared his fins like white fans of streamers or whiskers. A moray eel opened and shut their jaws as it bobbed it’s head out from a crevice between corals. It’s tiny white triangular teeth, glinting menacingly. There were long schools of yellow fish, flowing inbetween the coral heads and the divers. Neil took a picture an anemone that was split in half – half brown-purple and half bleached white. The coral fish inside it, rubbing and swimming between the two halves… it struck me as a great symbol of all of the archipelago. A family trying to make due in a home that was half healthy and half ruined.

We ate lunch a beach near the Urak Lawoi village. “a new boat, a new toy” said Darel as a group of local kids came over and started playing on our boat. I splashed around with one girl, we talked a little but she seemed young and I’m not sure how much Thai she knew yet.

The second dive was at a place called Stonehenge. It was full of huge bolders, strewn among the coral hill and the coral around them and each rock covered with a fascinating array of underwater life. It was like a garden of purple soft corals, that looked like braching fractals swaying in the current. The chubby branches, blistering with smaller whirls of purple lace, some were a dark purple and some where bleached and many were a creamy combination. While swimming I accidently brushed one with my hand and it felt like prickly rubber. I realized the best part of scuba may be how you can fly around, upside down, head first, all around the coral rocks and praticied gliding around looking very closely at all the details of the life around. The coral animals (like flower heads) coming out of each pore on the coral bodies. Their tiny heads like soft stars under the water, rust, or moss green, or white. My favorite kind of soft coral is the bubble coral. It looks like a sheet of inflated sacks/bubbles of varying sizes – mostly a little bigger than almonds. It’s a sort of transparent light brown and if you get very close you can see each inflated bubble is ridged like a fingerprint.

At each site we saw many algae covered nets and ropes where they had been cut or broken once tangled among the branches of the corals. We found a coconut milk bottle, and here and there the corals would be smashed, or white branches lay on the sand, or they would be dead and algae covered a kind of brownish green film overtop the decaying structure. Each coral probably showed some signs of damage. I usually wouldn’t notice the damage unless I thought about the really good looking corals and imagined what the reef must have looked like if all were untouched. It showed a pretty convincing shifted baseline for me: I could look at the reef and say “wow its perfect!”, unless I tired to actively imagine it without the damage as part of the landscape and try to visualize what it might once have looked like.

After the dives, we had some delicious thai snacks of gelatine balls with sugar and coconut on the outside, and a sweet liquid filling. In the late afternoon I interviewed the dive leaders from another resort, Castaway. They told some great stories, like seeing a moray eel as thick as a dinner plate and 2 meters long swimming over the reef during a night dive, and letting a shark out of one of the fisherman’s traps. They said the reef was some of the healthiest in Thailand, at least before the bleaching. And they hoped the cooler water temperatures (not 3 degrees less than when I came, from the rain) would help the coral recover, although no one knows one way or another what will happen. The reefs were great for their soft corals, and in comparatively good health aside from some physical damage (from anchors for instance). There were many little fish, and other interesting creatures to see. The biggest thing (before bleaching) was that they were missing was large fauna, fish, sharks, and turtles. These are things that other places have, like nearby more regulated national park Phi Phi. "How often do you see sharks?’ I asked. And one diver, Simon, said he had seen two or three in the last year, and knew them each and where they lived. “How many times do you think you’ve dived in the last year?” I asked. He thought about it and did some quick math on this fingers. “Probably more then three hundred times,” he said. “I see more big stuff, sharks and big fish coming off the fishing boats, or bar-b-qued on the beach, than I see in the water.”