Diving by the Numbers
Thailand’s West Coast Isles - Part 1
ISLANDS - An International Magazine
(March / April 1996)

The Crescent raised the Similan Islands just before down. I would have missed the first looming of land, had not been for the snoring of my berth mate. The loud death rattles from the bunk below, the gasps for breath, the long periods of dead silence, then the desperate gasp again – the sounds of man being strangled in his sleep – sent me up into the sea air, and I was instantly grateful. The moment my head cleared the hatch, I vowed never to sleep below again.

The night was warm and tropical. The Andaman Sea rolled peacefully underneath. The swells were gentle now, in late March, a month or two before the onset of the southwest monsoon and the rainy season. The marine diesel beat out its simple rhythm. On the deck were a dozen yellow air tanks in two rows, our dive bags in a pile, and the Thai deckhand asleep on his mat, his brown legs protruding from beneath his sheet. The steadying sail creaked overhead. A balmy sea wind entered the cabin window and thumbed through the pages of the paperback the captain had been reading at the helm, played with the corner of a chart on the table, and tousled the captain’s sun-bleached hair as he dozed. The ketch was steering herself on auto-pilot.

Ahead rose the dark curve of Ko Huyung, southernmost of the Similans, generally called just Number One, and the curve of Ko Payang, Number Two, and Ko Miang, Number Four. The islands were flanked by several dazzling points of light. At first I was mystified by this radiance. The punctuation of the light was not in points so much as in dashes – horizontal smears incandescent brightness. It was as if the sun had veered off course, northwestward, and was attempting to rise there in four or five places simultaneously.

We passed a mile of one of the lights, and inside the corona I recognized a squid boat. Two long booms studded with large electric bulbs – two brilliant wands of light – were cantilevered outward, one to either side, attracting squid to the nets.

There was something cheering in the lights. I would grow very fond of them, their brilliance a constant of the Andaman night, as inevitable on the horizon as the glitter of the constellations above. The squid-boat novas would switch on shortly after dusk, burn throughout the night, and continue for a while after dawn. They were particularly beautiful just before sunrise, competing bravely with the crepuscular glow of day.

THE SIMILANS lie off the west coast of Thailand, 50 nautical miles northwest of the island of Phuket. Similan means “nine” in Malay, a straightforward accounting of the number of the islands in the chain. Composed as they are of granite, the Similans do not have the look of oceanic islands, and in fact they are not. They are a range of hilltops temporarily inundated. In the next ice age, when the polar caps expand and the sea level drops, they will be connected to the Malay Peninsula again.

Today some argue that the Similans rank among the best dive sites in any sea. Just before sunrise the Crescent coasted by islands Numbers Five and Six. Jumbles of huge granite boulders marked the ends of both islands, some of the great stones balanced precariously one upon the other, as in some continental badlands. We turned into Number Four, Ko Miang, and tied up to a mooring buoy off the beach.