Done and dusted. Our temporary licences are stapled in our dive logs and were ready to hit the rest of the world running. Todays dives were both great but the first was truly brilliant. Weve only done 14 dives but number 13 was the best yet. Odd that... We arrived to be told we were being delayed an hour, but only so that they could prepare a speedboat to take us out instead of the usual big chuffing dive boat that seats 40. The speedboaot sat 8 and wasnt full so we were diving in true luxury today. Our first dive, to a plce called Chumpon Pinnacle, was to be our deepest ; a whopping 40m under the surface. We got down and did some experiments with colour, observing that the deeper you are, the fewer colours exist. At 40m there is no red at all. A can of coke looked black with white writing. Neat! The fish on the dive were amazing too. Its like there was a break out a genetics testing facility and all the giant fish decided that they take up residence at 24m on this one pinnacle. I saw the biggest cod ive ever imagined. A potato cod. He was well over a meter long and probably over a meter around, yet so well proportioned that it was like looking at a regular cod through a magnifying glass. The amount of chips required to make a proper meal of this behemoth would have left the potato industry reeling, and at least all the vinegar in the national reserves. Fortunately he comes ready salted. We also saw jellyfish, thousands of barracuda, snapper and, my personal favourite, Grouper. These are ugly brownish fish which, until today, i though were about 30 cm long when stretched. The ones we saw today however could have eaten the ones id seen previous without chewing and must have weighed nearly as much as i do. The only thing they seemed to be imtimidated by was the cod, unlike me, who was intimidated by this underwater freakshow and everything in it from start to finish. This, i suspect, is what made this such a great and memorable dive.
Ive been trying to get some more pictures up but the net here is blood boilingly slow and i loose patience with the whole thing before any pictures get within an hour of being uploaded. Ill try in the next place, Phuket.
