UNDERWATER WONDERLAND
Exploring the beauty of the Similan islands
ast spring, when my 22- year-old son Forrister and I pulled on wet suits and shouldered scuba tanks for our first night dive, we’d been aboard the Chinese junk in the Andaman Sea for all of 24 hours. As our launch shuttled us out to smooth granite rocks just peeking above the surface near Island No 9 in the Similan archipelago, I wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake. Even including that day’s three dives, the sum total of Forrister’s diving experience amounted to only seven.
The German couple seated next to us counted 2,000 dives between them. My last dive had been 17 years earlier in the Galapagos Islands. Since then technology had leaped forward with slick new dive computers, fancy regulators, Nitrox air mixtures, powerful LED flashlights and tiny video cameras. Could I protect Forrister? Was I putting him into a situation beyond his experience? Had I gone too far this time? I had not seen Forrister since the day after his college graduation in 2014 when he had left the next morning for a yearlong teaching fellowship in China. Communication had been spotty. I had been eager to continue a recent family tradition of taking a newly minted postgraduate child on an adventurous trip. I’ve always valued different kinds of travel with my family, whether it’s all of us together or one-on-one time with each of the two children. My then 21-year-old daughter and I had taken a challenging motorcycle trip through north Vietnam more than three years earlier. Escaping the distractions of home and predictable family interactions, we formed a new adult relationship in a neutral environment. But while my daughter and I often think alike, Forrister and I haven’t always. I’m strong-willed and so is he. Maybe it was just the father-son thing.
Far away now from the lights of the big boat, a wet inkiness obliterated the divide between sea and sky. We fell backward into the water on the count of three, plunging into a darkness so total that it appeared I had lost my vision entirely. My
breathing steadied after a few gulps of air. I twisted on my flashlight, which gave some comfort, but only illuminated the thinnest sliver of my new world. I spun around and saw nothing but my son and the dive master fiddling with their own lights. I swam over to Forrister. In diving parlance, he and I were “dive buddies”, who must never leave the other’s side or sight for safety reasons. The dive master would occasionally join us, but Forrister and I must count on each other. (Things rarely go wrong underwater, but if they do, they can happen quickly and end badly. An alert and nearby buddy can rectify most mishaps.) We descended.
Night diving resembles a caravan of cars snaking down an unlit mountain road on a moonless evening, inducing a strangely disembodied feeling. An active imagination immediately offered up a nightmare’s host of toothy, ravenous animals that lurked just outside the beam’s paltry reach. But these terrible fancies proved surprisingly easy to dismiss in the astonishing peacefulness. An incredible serenity flowed over me. That was, until my tyro son decided to head off on his own.
Five minutes into the dive at 18 metres, Forrister swam into a boulder canyon, making straight for a cave opening. No, I thought, you’re not really going in there. But, without so much as a glance back at me, he kicked right into its black maw, his light dimming, then blacking out entirely. The dive master had disappeared too. Just like that, Forrister had broken the first rule of the sacrosanct safety system by not communicating his intentions and leaving me, his buddy, alone.
I swam near the cave opening, running down a list of all the things that could go wrong: a tank caught on a rock obstruction or knocking one’s mask off and getting disoriented, all of which I had experienced underwater. Now anger and worry mixed into a horrible cocktail. I decided to spot him a couple of minutes, then follow him. Before that moment arrived, an eternity underwater at night, he emerged and rejoined me. Relief suddenly washed away all the worry but not all the irritation. Together we swam up to a pair of red-glowing eyes that belonged to a large painted spiny lobster bristling with an exotic armoured shell. We shut our lights off to experience total blackness, then swept our hands to agitate fluorescent phytoplankton. We looked in on a parrotfish asleep peacefully in a crevice.
Up top, my calm dissolved when I inquired sharply about the cave. “I thought you were going to follow me into it,” Forrister replied matter-of-factly. “It was cool.” “The buddy system,” I began, but felt a lecture coming on so I stopped. It’s an awkward conversation. “Nothing went wrong, right, Paps?” My “But, what if ...” question died on the tip of my tongue. I wondered if we would find a balance between his wanting to push the edges with my need for our being safe.
The Similan archipelago is one of the world’s premier diving destinations, a national park that lies some 60km off the southwestern coast. Their remoteness virtually requires serious divers to sign up for a so-called liveaboard, a type of tour in which a group of divers spend multiple days aboard a boat outfitted with oxygen compressors, cooks and dive instructors. While divers sleep, the boat cruises to the next destination. Without a moment’s hesitation we both agreed to forsake the luxuries of a sleek, modern cruiser in favour of a week aboard the June Hong
Chian Lee, a 100-foot, three-mast Chinese junk built in Penang, Malaysia, in 1962. The junk’s Hollywood past clinched the deal: James Bond and his girlfriend sailed
>> into the sunset aboard it during the last scenes of the 1974 film The Man With the Golden Gun.
I made arrangements for a seven-day excursion that would take us north to the outlying islands of Koh Bon, Koh Tachai and, finally, Richelieu Rock, the latter a rock pinnacle not far from the Myanmar border that barely breaks the surface of the water and hosts a world-famous soft-coral reef. I also started burning up laps at the pool. My son and I met on the beach near Phuket.
As we motored out of Patong Beach Harbour, members of the mostly Thai eight-person crew shot off fireworks to scare away the bad spirits and encourage the good ones to join us aboard. A traditional bouquet of good-luck flowers adorned the bow. The junk featured a broad foredeck, upon which teak deck chairs lined a row of tables, all protected from the bright sun by a tarp. Most of the 15 divers onboard set up shop here, sucking down water mixed with electrolytes, making entries into dive logs and comparing notes.
Each day began with a bell at 6.30am, a briefing at 7am and a dive at 7.15am. Once we dried off from our first dive of the day, our two cooks brought out a multicourse breakfast of Thai and Western dishes. Few of our shoreside meals had matched these delicious home-cooked feasts, which included sauteed whole fish, spicy massaman curry, tom yum goong, larb gai, fried spring rolls and phat Thai. And there was always a vegetarian option. We repeated this process in the midmorning, midafternoon and evening. A refrigerator full of beer awaited us after our last dive of the day.
A workable buddy system still continued to elude Forrister and me. He didn’t want me to tell him what to do, nor did I want to, but safety demanded communication. We worked on some navigational skills underwater — and our signals got tangled, mostly around who was supposed to do what.
On the eastern side of the islands, which faces the mainland and is relatively protected from strong currents, we met forests of soft corals, beds of anemones with their waving tentacles offering refuge for bright orange clownfish right out of Finding Nemo. Yet the miniforests of corals in neon pink, purple, orange and yellow were more Peter Max-inspired crazy than anything Pixar offers up, their stalks so delicate that one swipe of a fin can destroy years of growth. Some gorgonian fan corals grew larger than a linebacker. Other huge, white, feathery soft corals reminded me of an ostrich’s rear end. About them swam the world’s most colourful fish, including my favourite, the powder blue surgeonfish, whose flanks bore a splash of blue as rich as the sky on the finest spring day.
In the profusion of colour, we almost missed a pair of bright yellow tigertail seahorses with tails interlocked. The scruffy 15cm male appeared a little beleaguered, his stomach distended with some 1,500 eggs deposited earlier by
the female. He’d bring them to term, then spit out a host of tiny progeny. Forrister and I learned to swim right up to the coral and peer at the teeming reef from inches away. That way I spotted an unfortunately named varicose wart slug, its black 10cm form exquisitely decorated with a Warholesque pattern of tiny fried eggs.
The islands’ western shores revealed a wholly different character. Calm, sandy-bottomed waters gave way to strong currents and jumbles of house-size boulders that formed avenues and alleys, caves and twisting passages. Three-quarters of the way through our trip, we dove on Elephant Head Rock, off Island No 8, which possessed a city block’s worth of narrow passages through a boulder field. We negotiated this three-dimensional labyrinth, levitating up over rocks by holding our breath to become more buoyant, then exhaling to sink back down and kicking through dark passages. Forrister and I worked in harmony, changing leads effortlessly, following colourful fish, peering under boulders and pointing out hidden creatures. Few soft corals lived there, but the angelfish popped psychedelically against the grey backdrop. Only hours later did I realise that we had achieved perfect balance underwater.
The islands’ western side also brought a huge school of pelagic — or open-sea — fish. Forrister and I approached a school of several hundred metre-long blackfin barracuda, their perfect predator bodies and mouthfuls of keen teeth unsettling but mesmerising to watch. They were not interested in us, so we manoeuvred underneath them and observed their slow, methodical circling, a collective hunting behaviour they use to corral prey fish, gradually narrowing the trap as they rise.
I was routinely running out of air a little before Forrister, mostly because I was much older than he — and on one dive he decided to continue on, leaving me to surface alone. When he finally came up he realised that I was angry in earnest this time. Buddies always surface together, I told him. That’s just the way it was. He listened carefully, then agreed. It was as though we were learning a new, challenging language together.
Things settled down after that; we even got a bonus. On our 12th dive, at Koh Tachai, we ascended to our safety stop at about six metres, when an immense, meaty blackand-white form glided by, only a few feet underneath us. Like seeing a moose in the Maine woods or an elephant in Africa, it was too gargantuan to comprehend at first glance. With a wingspan of three metres, the reef manta ray bore a wide-open mouth that seemed large enough to swallow one of us. But these rays are truly gentle giants, consuming only plankton.
As the trip progressed, I found that I not only trusted Forrister’s judgement more but actually welcomed it. More important, I was shedding the ingrained parental need to take care of him every second. He was also paying more attention to safety, touching base underwater with me far more frequently. It had taken time, but we had cobbled out a way to work together. I felt that we had taken some step forward in our adult relationship together.
On the last day, we all helped the crew pull up the darkred sails for a ritual sail, then sipped margaritas. Forrister — the youngest diver on board — entertained everyone with flips off the high deck. I observed how the others loved Forrister’s enthusiasm and curiosity — and saw through their eyes how he’s matured into being his own man. Turns out he’s a really good diver, too, perhaps better than I am.
When it was all over and we had said our goodbyes to our new diving friends, Forrister and I relaxed on a wide stretch of pristine white sand near Patong, letting our bodies leach out absorbed nitrogen in our blood before our flights. (Flying without spending a day “off gassing” means you may well experience the debilitating — sometimes fatal — condition called the bends.) The prospect of another trip came up, as well as a conversation about Forrister’s still-gelling future, and why I made certain career decisions. New vistas have opened up for both of us. At breakfast, he reached for a banana and we laughed spontaneously, remembering the moment when he was snorkelling and a hawksbill turtle swam up to him and took a section of banana right out of his hand.