Swimming With Giants

Life cannot offer many places finer than standing at 8:30 on a balmy morning on the back of a dive-outfitted yacht, about to take a plunge into the Deep Blue Wet.

I’m sharing the experience with a dozen other like-minded scuba divers who have come from around the world to the Similan Islands. Our floating home for this 4-day outing is the Mermaid II, a luxurious  ‘liveaboard’ dive boat.

But we’re not here for the spectacular corals or the over 3000 varieties of reef fish (the highest diversity anywhere on our little blue marble). No, we’re here in search of the graceful giant mantas and the elusive whale sharks that roam these waters. We’re here for the pelagics - ‘the big stuff’.

The Similans Marine Park - Thailand’s first and oldest - is an archipelago of nine uninhabited islands out in the Andaman Sea, some 100km northwest of Phuket. These jade-green flecks are skirted by pale-yellow beached, hemmed in by the clear, light-blue, warm waters above the shallow reefs, and finally engulfed by the unfathomable deep-blue sea. This is natural beauty that pulls no punches.

Over the last 20 years or so, the Similans has earned itself a reputation for being an underwater paradise – a place both novice and advanced divers return to frequently for what Jacques Cousteau extolled as one of the world's most interesting and important marine ecosystems. It doesn’t hurt that the water is clear and warm and blue and beautiful.

As Thailand’s premier dive destination, this underwater spectacle has become a vortex for visitors with adventure on their minds. Aquaholics have worshipped at the nine Similan Islands since the early days of dive-tourism in South-east Asia. Incidentally, the islands got their name from Malay fishermen many centuries ago who simply called the nine islands ‘sembilan’, meaning nine.

Of the 35 dive sites around the Similans, only three sites were heavily damaged by last year’s tsunami. These have joined four other sites previously set aside by the Marine Park for a multi-year regeneration plan.

This leaves 28 immaculate dive sites open to divers, and virtually untouched.

The attraction for divers is as clear as the water. Between November and May, the oceanic currents which well up from the depths of the Indian Ocean bring in one of the largest concentrations of ocean-going marine life in the world. And thanks to the relatively shallow, calm waters around the Similans, divers have a pretty good chance of encountering one of these behemoths of the deep.