In light of the growing frustration regarding the lack of
scuba-related content, I thought some of you might be interested in a
(lengthy) trip report with exotic places, suspense, sex and violence.

My wife and I wanted to take a beach and diving holiday in end-99. We
settled for Thailand. I had lived there a few years so that is always
an easy option. I suggested that we go a bit off the beaten track.
Tarutao Marine Park, at the extreme south of Thailand on the Andaman
sea, sounded like the kind of isolated place where one could expect to
find some reasonably good diving as well.

After some research I had confirmation that there was a diving club
operating on the only island where accommodation exits in the Park, so
I informed them that we would be diving with them and rented a
bungalow nearby.

The diving club essentially consisted of a Canadian guy. When
establishing his business he brought quite a large amount of equipment
with him, some of which must have featured in the early Cousteau
movies. The dive boat is a small long-tail with a Thai skipper, both
of respectable age.

We typically did two dives a day. We would leave in the morning, have
a first dive, then lunch and some rest on a nearby Island, and then do
our second dive and come back in the afternoon.

Diving is OK but not exceptional, similar to what you can find on that
coast of Thailand such as around Phuket and Koh Phi Phi etc. As this
is a Marine Park, and as This Is Thailand, the area has been fished
extensively (including the use of explosives or cyanide). It seems
that anything of edible size has been exterminated (or has become
extremely cautious). However small fishes remain abundant and there
are a very large variety of corals, both hard and soft, in the many
undamaged areas.

Security arrangements are quite interesting. The park is several hours
of boat away from the coast, has no medical facilities and is out of
range of the Thai GSM network. The boat has a CB that allows it, under
favorable circumstances, to call the dive club or the nearby Rangers
station. In case of emergency the boat would therefore call the club.
Someone would then have to go to another nearby island that has a high
enough hill, and climb on top of that hill where you can get signal
from the GSM network of Malaysia. He would then call the Thai
emergency services. If you had a proper insurance they would dispatch
a helicopter, if not you would only get a boat (meaning about 12 hours
for the round trip). You would then be evacuated to the mainland where
they have appropriate facilities (there are offshore oil and gas
platforms in the gulf of Thailand).

So one morning we left for our usual dive trip, together with a couple
of newly certified OW divers. We left relatively early, as the dive
sites were farther away than usual. The skipper had some difficulties
starting its engine but that was quickly fixed.

As the other divers were really novice, my wife and I felt that our
diving would be more enjoyable by going on our own for the first dive.
We were only AOW with a few dozen dives but the conditions were
favorable (warm water, good visibility, no current, shallow dive close
to shore). Our dive was fine and uneventful. Going alone was a good
idea as the other pair of divers (that had stayed with the DM) had to
interrupt their dive when the guy started feeling cold.

We then settled on a small beach to have lunch and rest. Lunch was
spicy pork salad on rice, which was bad news for the guy as he was of
Jewish confession. So he skipped lunch but took some rest and felt
much better afterwards.

We then moved on to our next dive, which would be even more relaxed as
the first one as we would take advantage of the tide to do a shallow
(5-10 m) drift dive over a corals garden in a channel between two
small islands, with the boat picking us at the end of the dive.

We all entered the water together and started drifting. After a little
while the guy signaled that he was feeling cold again and would ascend
back to the boat, but that his wife, the DM and us should continue,
which we did. Other than that the dive was uneventful, until we
surfaced and found that the boat had not moved and was still anchored
where we left it, a few hundred meters away.

We waived and called to attract the skippers attention, but the boat
did not move and the skipper signaled us to get back to the boat.
Swimming back against the current was quite exhausting but we made it
OK. The skipper had been unable to restart its engine (the engine had
not been that fixed after all) and therefore the boat had remained
anchored in place.

But the main problem was that the OW guy was nowhere in sight.

Things were getting serious. The guy had been cold in the morning, had
not had lunch, had felt cold again and left the group in a fairly fast
current, while he was not a strong swimmer and no boat was available.

The engine would not restart but as the tide current eventually abated
somewhat, we decided to let the boat slowly drift in order to scan the
shores on both sides of the channel. We finally located a shape on the
shore, but got no reaction when calling and waiving. We were quite far
from the shore but, as the boat would not drift on the right
direction, decided that two of us would swim to the shore and see if
that was the guy.

We swam to shore and yes, that was him. He was a bit exhausted but
otherwise fine. We gave him some water that we had brought with us and
the three of us swam back to the boat.

But we were left with the problem of getting back home, with no
engine, and having drifted further away in the channel. We were well
over the range of the CB the boat could use to reach the club.
Eventually, people would see that we were not back and send a rescue
boat, but that could take some time (assuming they could sail at
night) and we were getting well into the afternoon.

In the meantime the ladies settled for sunbathing, leaving such manly
tasks as fixing the engine or moving the boat to the Real Men on
board.

However, as I mentioned above this is a National Park and This Is
Thailand, so there was quite a bit of fishing going on. Our best hope
for a quick rescue was to attract the attention of a trawler. Those
are typically small boats with Burmese crews that operate under harsh
conditions for months at a time. As we were hardly visible inside the
channel, we tried to pull back the boat closer to the channel’
mouth so as to have a better field of view.

Our efforts bore fruits as a fishing boat eventually saw us, and
changed course to reach us. He was getting close when it dawned upon
us (our skipper, actually) that it might not be entirely safe to
invite a party of sailors, who had been at sea for several weeks in a
row, onboard a boat with two you young bikini-clad ladies, with no
other boat in sight.

I have seldom seen ladies get dressed that fast.

The fishermen were actually perfectly civil and willing to help. Our
engine had a generator/battery problem and they helped us restart it,
and left once they were reassured that we were fine and would be able
to make it safely back to the club.

[end of sex and violence]

Which we did and we arrived as the night was falling.

This was actually a real eye-opener to me, showing how a succession of
seemingly minor problems may eventually result in some potentially
serious troubles. In retrospect I realize that we (the dive operator
as well as ourselves) had consistently broken all safety rules and
that we were lucky in that none of it had serious consequences.

When going on holiday in such laid-back places it is easy to leave
commonsense at home, at least for me, while the locals (or westerners
that have over-extended their stay, and I ve once been one of them)
tend to have a different appreciation of what is an acceptable risk.

Next time I could speak about our one and only experience with cave
diving in Yucatan (we survived that one as well).