At Wicked we are pretty proud of the green footprints we, and everyone who dives with us try to make on our local environment, both above and under water. But this time we will make you go green in a slightly different way. We will make you green with envy. Because on this trip we have seen so much cool stuff you won’t believe it.
The first tree dives we did at Surin islands, and that was where the bigger sights of the trip were made. Both a blacktip and a withetip reefshark found their way past us, along with two turtles, a massive Jenkins Ray, and 5 Napoleon wrasse!
In the afternoon we went to Surin North for a beach visit. One of our green initiatives is beach clean up and nature thanked us for ridding it of some rubbish, by showing us several pipefish between the corals in the shallows, that was visible from above due to an unusually low tide.
At Richelieu Rock the water was clear as glass, and we got to do not 1, not 2, but 3 (THREE!!!) dives. And even though it’s hard to catch the greatness of the diving on this crosaint shaped rock in writing, we’ll give it a try.
A few groups got to experience harlequin shrimps, as they left a trace of maltreated sea stars leading us to them. In a hole a baby ornated ghost pipefish was hiding out, and as if that wasn’t enough we also saw tiger eggshell cowrie, tomato anenemome fishes, anenemome crabs, a winged pipe horses, a Jens Pipefish and a dragon sized blue dragon nudibranch (OK in all fairness, we are exaggerating a little bit here, the blue dragon was only finger sized, but still, it was SOO cool)
Throughout all of our three (sorry, we couldn’t help ourself, we had to mention it again) dives at Richelieu Rock, four cuttlefish were playing out the love story of the century, as three males were all fighting for the same female. Besides the fact that marine life sex is always cool to see, it was also really interesting to get to follow the mating rituals of these marine creatures over several dives and not just as a short encounter on a single dive.
And to make matters even better, on the way back to Tachai we had several dolphins/whales in the surface. (Or one really active one pretending to be many). We were unfortunately not able to identify which kind of dolphin or whale it was so we could brag about that to, but hey, you can’t get everything in life.
We had several different sweet lips encounters on this trip, both with a oriental juvenile sweet lip that was buzzing around at Tachai, a teenage oriental sweetlip at Richelieu that was in the process of changing from spots to stripes, and an really big and old Andeman sweet lip at Aow Pakad.
We could go on and on about the couple of octopus was saw at Koh Bon, who was also courting each other (it was a bit less dramatic though, since it was only the two of them),all the different nudis, the squids and the hunting fimbriated moray eel on the nightdive and the juvenile angelfish, but we are gonna stop the showing off now.
But if you want to get rid of the sligthly green glow your skin will have retained after reading about all this underwater awesomeness, and if your want to help us make the world a little greener instead, come join us on one of our Similan Liveaboard and get the chance to work on your tan – and do some great diving of course.
And if you already were on the WD Similan trip 25, we just want to thank you for for making this a really memorable trip for us.
Megan, Tim, Dan, Alex and Marie
