Queen Scuba - Day 2

(Rich's 4th post)

We all certainly slept better last night with the boat moored. Of course, having four dives and five meals plus a beer under our belts were significant factors as well.

The bow of the Queen Scuba in the morning

In order to dive, I'm still trying to suppress my cold, and so I'm laying off both the beer and coffee. This morning I'm heavily dosed up again on Tylenol, Actifed, Afrin, and amoxicillan. A walking pharmacy.

Our main cabin windows

At dawn we sit for a light breakfast and dive briefing. We're moored beside Island #9 in the Similans, and the site will be Three Trees, aptly marked by three big trees on the shore.

1st breakfast - What is that, Dad?

Peanut butter and butter - breakfast of champions

It's a very nice site consisting of an inclined reef with coral islands and sandy patches. Early on we spot a peacock mantis shrimp. They're the size of a very small lobster, but with pretty markings, and they wallop their prey with a forceful shock capable of breaking aquarium glass. Janel pings her fingers off her mask glass to remind us.

Compared to the Queen Scuba, this liveaboard looks like a tenement building

The Three Trees

There is a gorgeous juvenile emperor angelfish on top of a coral mound, with bright concentric rings. Tuna divebomb from the surface here and there. We also spot a couple of yellow margin triggerfish that look every bit as menacing as the nasty titan triggerfish. Aside from these few identifications, the reef is overflowing with huge schools of juvenile reef fish, rainbow groupers, angelfish, fusiliers, and tons of fish everywhere.

Kim's pic of the juvenile emperor angelfish, plus an anemonefish at left

Kim finds a great nudibranch, specifically a hypselodoris bulockii, blue with orange twirlygigs. He got a great picture of it, and when he looked at it later, he saw that there was a baby one as well.

This is Kim's picture of the hypselodoris bulockii nudibranch. See the baby one behind the adult?

Time to sleep, not dive

The Italians suiting up

The water is warm, around 83F, but we encounter some good thermoclines. The interface is shimmery, and when we go through the temps drop to about 77 or 78F.

At our 2nd (real) breakfast, we decide to examine each other's toe hairs. Hmmmm...

Kim says that we are one of the cooler groups he's had in a long time. I think that means we are easy to manage, pretty self sufficient.

Makeshift divelog

What did we see?

Between dives, I take a short nap, while Linda and Janel chat with the crew in the salon. They relate some stories about OW students. One of the required underwater skills is to breathe on the regulator, then exhale with the regulator out, then put the reg back in and continue breathing. For some reason, this student thought you HAD to have the regulator out to exhale, and started doing all his breathing that way.

Blogging the previous day

Another required underwater skill is to flood your mask, then clear it using air from your exhalation. Instead, one student flooded his mask, then apparently sucked all the water from it using his nose!

At 11:00am it's time for our second dive. We've motored up to an island called Koh Bon. There are lots of boats here, so we delay our dive a bit so there won't be as many divers in the water.

Queen Scuba Day Planner - dive dive dive

We start on the wall side of a big limestone ridge jutting off the island at around 50 feet depth. The thermoclines and patches of cold water are more pronounced here, but nothing too shivery for our 3mm wetsuits.

There's a possiblity we'll see manta rays, and our plan is to swim out to the end of the ridge at about 90 feet, then explore the other reefy side for the remainder of the dive. On the way, Kim finds a ghost shrimp and shows me. I see it, but just barely, as my 52 year-old eyesight is failing me all the small stuff.

At one point, Kim points out another red fire goby, but a stunning oriental sweetlips strolls through and steals the show. We also spy another peacock mantis shrimp and a bar-tailed moray eel. The reef side of the ridge contains huge areas of coral rubble, a result of indiscriminate dynamite fishing that occurred here before the island was added to the national park. The rubble area looks sorta bad, but it is starting to grow back, and all sorts of tiny critters can be found there.

No mantas, oh well. I've got a pretty good headache on exit, which seems to start at the safety stop and progress. Not sure why - maybe my cold, maybe my new mask smashing my nose a bit, maybe I'm not breathing enough?

We've learned something on this dive trip. Never go on a liveaboard with rental gear. For one or two dives, it's fine, but not for repetitive weeklong diving. Our rental BCDs are all too big - mine digs a channel in my neck from riding up and Janel's tank is constantly banging her in the head. All our 2nd stages are uncomfortably too big for our mouths.

I'm missing my videocamera too!

We talk to Arizona Mike at lunch. He tells us that his mom, at age 59, was restless and wanted to do something else with her life. With Mike's support, she decided to move to Africa and volunteer in at an HIV clinic in Lesotho, and has now been there 4 years. Wow - talk about a life changing event!

I'm a little dizzy with my headache during lunch and I don't eat much, so I decide to sit out the third dive. At least I get an opportunity to take a few pictures of my girls getting into the water. The dive is again at Koh Bon.

Linda and Kim check her nitrox breathing mix

Suiting up

Gooping up

First Janel

Then Linda

The Finns and the Americans (and one Dane)

I napped the whole time, but Linda returns with a story. If you haven't seen them, titan triggerfish are nasty buggers. They're about 3 feet long and have big chomper teeth. They build shallow conical nests in the sand bottom, and they also claim a conical territory above their nests as a keep-out zone. This includes divers.

Linda was observing them but accidentally swam about 10 feet directly over one of the nests. The offended titan came zooming straight for her, teeth bared. Kim's eyes got wide and Linda started frantically finning at the fish. Fortunately no harm was done, except for Linda's panic attack.

Kim's picture of the nasty titan triggerfish

Kim found flatworms having a live sex show, giant morays, two devil scorpionfish (Mr. and Mrs. Ugly), and copper sweepers.

Linda also tells me that the post-dive snack was hamburgers, which sounds pretty good to me. When the 4th dive briefing is called at 5:00pm, I head up and find a few burgers still waiting. We've motored further north and are now at Koh Tachai.

At 5:30pm, the four of us enter the water and find a very nice divesite, with both reef and big rocks. A moderate current is flowing, in some places strong. Thermoclines are more pronounced than ever, and about half our dive time is in colder water. Topside water temp was around 84F, while I record 74F inside some of the cold zones.

There are lots and lots of reef fish here, zillions of butterflyfish, surgeonfish, etc., plus quite a few lionfish, boxfish, longnosed emperorfish, and brown marbled groupers. Kim's expert eye finds a tiny sharp-nosed pygmy pouched pipe horse (relative of a seahorse), an oscillated wart slug, and some cool feather sea stars.

Predator fish are zooming about, too, including big eye trevalleys, black trevalleys, mackerel (striped bonito), and tuna. Near the end of the dive, a stunning school of maybe 10 spadefish (a.k.a. longfin batfish) posed unafraid for Kim's camera, each fish bigger than a dinner plate.

We do our 5 minute safety stop mid-water, and I'm again presented with a headache. I've taken note to breathe deeply on this dive, so I guess it is just sinus pressure from my cold, coupled with something about ascending from the dive. As we emerge from the water, the sun is just setting and it's really gorgeous out.

Kim snapped this photo just after we surfaced at sunset

Back on the boat, the staff immediately serves us a cold coconut smoothie, followed by a hot towel. Sweet!

Unfortunately, my headache really starts to rage, taking on the character of a migraine. No way I can eat - I head to the room and spend the rest of the night trying to get to sleep, which of course is difficult with the migraine. Even when I do get to sleep, I wake up and the headache is still there, which is unusual.

Sorry my blog contains so much about my poor headache, but if you've ever had a migraine, you know that you can think of little else.

Linda brings a dinner plate in to me, but the bread is only thing I can eat. My stomach is fine, but the brain pain makes me nauseous of food. Fade to black...