Diving by the Numbers
Thailand’s West Coast Isles - Part 2
ISLANDS - An International Magazine
(March / April 1996)
Text by: Kenneth Brower
Photographs by: Art Brewer
The Crescent was a 60-foot ketch
equipped with all the alphabet soup of modern navigation – GPS,
SSB, and VHF – along with two air compressors for the dive tanks.
Her crews, like that of Melville’s Pequod, was multinational:
The captain was an expatriate Briton, the divemaster an expatriate
American, and the cook and deckhand were Thai.
Aboard for this trip were three Germans, a Norwegian,
an Italian, a Canadian, and two other expatriate Britons, one now
a resident of Bangkok, the other of Yemen. The group chemistry
was good, much better certainly than Pequod’s. We had no Ahab
aboard and were in pursuit of no white whale
If we had an obsession, it was the whale shark,
a fish sometimes encountered in these waters.
Through my binoculars, from the Crescent’s
mooring, I studied our first Similan landfall. Number Four, it turned
out, was representative: The shore was a rampart of huge granite
domes, monoliths, and boulders, sculptured into a variety of shapes,
interrupted at intervals by long stretches of white-sand beach.
The beaches, in their flatness and their whiteness, contrasted strikingly
with the dark voluptuousness of the stone.
Just inland of beach and boulder was an intermittent
border of Scaevola, the salt-tolerant, spring green shrub that marks
high tide lines all across the Indo-Pacific. Behind rose the darker
green of rain forest, its canopy pruned into fluid forms by sea
wind and accented here and there by the white of dead snags, or
by the red stratified foliage of tropical almond trees. There was
not a coconut palm to be seen.
 I’AM
A CALIFORNIAN, the son of mountaineer. My first memories are
of the Sierra Nevada – not the forested lower elevations of
those mountains, but the high Sierra, the bare glaciated above timberline.
The figurative granite of my first recollections is actual, literal
granite. I can’t describe how strange it was to see that same
obdurate rock, in all the forms I remembered from the thin air at
12,000 feet, here submerged off Thailand in bluish light a hundred
feet beneath the sea.
From that first dive, the underwater world of
the Similans was dreamlike, a sensation familiar and yet strange.
The granite underpinnings of the islands – the undersea talus
of boulders at
their foundation – were full of archways, alleys, tunnels,
caverns, and swim-throughs, and we spent much of our bottom time
exploring those. Each giant step in fins and scuba tank off the
Crescent’s stern, each drop down to those sunken cities of
boulders, felt like a descent into the kind of reordered experience,
the sea-changed terrain that one wanders in sleep.
  
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