Diving by the Numbers
Thailand’s West Coast Isles - Part 4
ISLANDS - An International Magazine
(March / April 1996)

The archipelago lies at the edge of the continental shelf, near deep water, and sometimes I would look up from reef fish grazing the granite to see skipjack tuna and other pelagic species cruise in from the deep.

WE DIVED OFF Beacon Point, a beautiful granite dome on Ko Similan, which for its place in the northward sequence is called Number Eight – confusing, since it means “Nine.” There we met black Indian triggerfish, pink clouds of fairy basslets, and slow, tame schools of long fin batfish.

Off the same island we dived at Christmas Point amid blue-spotted rays, giant triggerfish, and tree of a luminous blue soft coral. There, our Italian shipmate, Maurizio Caduto, found the biggest flying gurnard I have ever seen. The flying gurnard does not really fly; at the forward edge of its enormous, wing like pectoral fins are a set of “fingers” with which it probes sandy bottoms for food. On learning that this improbable fish was known to science, Maurizio was disappointed.

“I thought I was the discoverer,” he lamented.

On Number Nine, or Bangu, we dived a spot called Snapper Alley, or The Crack, and encountered large schools of yellow-dash fusiliers and chequered snappers, and the shy, oddly named little damselfish called the Indian humbug, which hid from us in stag horn coral. The beautiful juveniles of another, somewhat bolder, damselfish, black with small dots of a shining blue-white, would drift, but not run, from us toward the protection of the sea anemones they shared with skunk clownfish.

From Number Nine, the last of the Similans, Crescent sailed up toward the Surin Islands, the archipelago to the north. On the way we stopped at an intermediate island, Ko Bon, which did not belong to any group. It was a solitary island, unnumbered, an archipelago unto itself.

That night lightning played steadily along the horizon. Each flash showed the island’s summit ridge in jagged silhouette and blinked in Morse code through the hole of a natural arch that perforated the island.

We went for a night dive along the cliff. A berm of broken stag horn coral lay just offshore – clear evidence of fish-dynamiting here, just outside the boundaries of Moo Ko Similan National Park – but life was fairly abundant, anyway. The Indo Pacific night shift had gone on duty. A sea urchin, protected by its long black spines, flowed slowly over the bottom, foraging. Soldier fish had left their caves and were hunting open water with their huge, night-adapted eyes. The parrotfish of the day shift had retired to their crevices. They lay stationary against the rock but had not yet extruded the transparent, mucous cocoons that would protect them overnight.