Diving by the Numbers
Thailand’s West Coast Isles - Part 6
ISLANDS - An International Magazine
(March / April 1996)

WE SAILED ON to the Surin Islands. They were larger and taller island than the Similans, but there were fewer of them – just two big islands and three islets, all protected as Moo Ko Surin National Park.

Civilization in the Surins – if “civilization” is the word – clustered on either side of a narrow strait between the two main islands. On the north side of the strait were park headquarters a scattering of bungalows for visitors. On the south side was a village of the Chao Lay, sea gypsies.

Sea gypsies are a small, nomadic, scattered race of people who wander the islands off Thailand and Burma. They are almost entirely dependent on the resources of the ocean, and the fleet of boats moored off Surin villages was more substantial than the village itself.

The sea-gypsy canoe is a kind of ocean going sampan, its deck shaded by a mat roof for almost the entire length of the hull, its prow and stern elegantly bifurcated. It was driven once by sail, surely, but now by long-shaft outboard. The shacks of the village, by contrast, were the smallest, flimsiest dwellings I had seen in the tropics. With floors and walls of split bamboo, roofs of thatch, most of the shacks were built on spindly stilts right along the water’s edge, as if for the reassurance of the slap of waves underneath.

Several smoky cooking fired were burning on the sampans. The sea gypsies seemed reluctant to come ashore even to prepare their meals. A half dozen children were building a sand village on the beach. The castle, I noticed, was not in their repertoire. The children, several with necklaces of Thai coins, drifted off now and then in games of tag, played just as in America, except for the extreme gentleness of the tagging itself.

One woman hunkered under the stilts of her house, washing clothes in the waters of the strait. Another woman sat under the lashed-pole frame of a new house, surrounded by piles of palm fronds, making thatch for the roof. The women wore sarongs, with T-shirts, or brassieres in several colors, or nothing at all above the waist. I saw only three men in the village, There were several more aboard the sampans, and the rest, I supposed, were at sea.

It is generally agreed that the sea gypsies are not Thai, either culturally or linguistically. But their place of origin and other cultural details remain uncertain. The Surins, it seems, are ripe for anthropology.

AT BURMA BANKS, out of sight of land, we dived 50 feet down to the top of a seamount, carrying chopped-up barracuda we had caught en route, to feed silvertip sharks. The silvertip is one of the most beautiful sharks in the ocean, and on three dives at Burma Banks, we were surrounded by them, big silvertips and small. For some of us, Burma Banks was the climax of our trip. But not for me.

Ten miles southeast of the Surin’s is a navigational hazard called Richelieu Rock. Several of boulders of the rock come close to the surface, and the topmost pinnacle breaks the water at low tide. Richelieu Rock is a good spot for shovelnose and marbled rays, but its most celebrated visitors are whale sharks. This largest of fish, a creature that can reach as much as 60 feet in length, is rare almost everywhere else in the sea, but calls regularly on Richelieu Rock.

In retrospect, Richelieu Rock was, for me, the climax of the voyage.

Over two days we dived five times there, determined to encounter that most giant and gentle of sharks. We came to know the rock well: The giant moray eel that lived in one of its alcoves, the small yellow morays that ribboned among the corals below, and the moon wrasse that spawned in aggregations over the summits of the higher boulders.

On my forth dive on the rock, through a school of fusiliers, I saw a huge, dim shape below. The head was board and flattened, the tail fin oversized. My dive partner and I glanced at each other in wild surmise, our eyes big behind our face-masks, and we swam down to the whale shark.

For 15 minutes, until our air ran low, we accompanied the shark. We swam above the great back, its vast expanse dappled beautifully with lines and spots. We swam alongside, admiring the strange ridges along its flanks. Now and then we ducked to avoid the giant, slow, sculling oar of the tail. Once my partner let his hand rest briefly on the flank. Lifting his hand away, he looked at me in wonder across the mountainous back of the fish.

We swam below the white undersize, gazing up at the dozens of remoras hitching rides. A few of the remoras swam along the belly, or had attached there, but most clustered beneath the pectoral fins. Three cobias large, grey, pelagic fish that look like a cross between salmon and shark followed some distance behind. A shifting cloud of golden pilot jacks swam about the head, their tail fins beating 20 times for each slow tail beat of whale shark.

The great shark orbited Richelieu Rock like a whole world. Its small, unintelligent eye looked out through the cloud of pilot jacks, as if through the cataracts. It did not seem to register anything. It simply swam its slow, age old, endless journey through the sea. It took no notice of its hangers-on.

We had joined that procession. Like all humans who leave ever swum with the whale shark, and like the remoras, cobias, and pilot jacks before us, we fell in love with the shark, caught up in its gravitational filed, swept along by the dumb, godlike majesty of the most colossal of fish.