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Firefly - Cruising the crystal clear waters of Similan, Thailand



Today is Sunday 31st January and overnight Firefly was anchored off Koh Miang, also known as Island number 4 of the Similan Islands. This chain of 9 Granite Islands lie about 40 miles east of the west coast of Thailand. They derive their name from the Malay word, 'sembilan' meaning 9.

The water is incredibly clear with fantastic visibility when snorkeling. We have a dive guidebook for Thailand and are using it to visit the various dive sites in this area. We can't actually SCUBA dive as we don't have our own tanks but as we can see so well, snorkeling is fine. In addition to the effect of the 2004 Tsunami, there has been some coral bleaching here - this happens when the water temperature rises to over 30 degrees centigrade. The dive book says it happened in 2010 and that generally the effect is not to bad. From what we can see so far the coral is pretty devastated, the bleaching clearly kills it. However, while the coral has been affected, the marine life is abundant and we have seen a great deal of fish.

This is area is a National Marine Park and has been since 1982. It seems quite well managed and no fishing is allowed within a 5 mile radius. At night there are the lights from many fishing boats working all around this perimeter but fortunately the fish must understand this as we keep encountering large shoals. We have not seen such large numbers of fish since we were much further south in SE Asia, when we dived off Moyo Island near Sumbawa, Indonesia.

We are moving quite slowly at present and were anchored in one spot, off island number 5, called Koh Hok, for 3 days. Swimming over from Firefly, 2 or 3 times per day, we explored amongst the rocks on the west side of this little island. No one else seemed to visit this particular area and we had our own small marine paradise. Numerous fish; Parrot, Trigger, Fuseliers, Puffers, Grunts, Angelfish and Filefish and many more. The highlight was a scribbled Filefish with fabulous blue markings and two free swimming Moral Eels (unusually not hidden in the rocks as we have always seen them previously).

At lunchtime today we moved north to Koh Similan, the largest in the island chain and we are tied up to one of the many buoys provided for the live aboard dive boats by the National Park. Interestingly we found some live and colourful coral at the Beacon Beach Reef which was encouraging. Here there are no tourist or dive boats stopping - perhaps this is part of the current park rules but if so we have no way of knowing as nothing is mentioned in our dive guide or pilot books.

There are 2 small camps at the National Park HQ where people can stay overnight on the Similans. Other than that there are quite a number of live aboard diveboats and just a handful of yachts. The tourists do flock in from the mainland and arrive in the ubiquitous speedboats, carrying about 40 passengers, that we saw around Phuket. However, its much less chaotic here as they only start arriving at 1000 and are gone by 1500, plus they stop in a limited number of places and follow more sets routes.

There was a mobile phone mast on Koh Miang and we did manage one crackly telephone call. The system is not up to handling e mail so having been without a connection (unusual in SE Asia) we have reverted to sending messages and receiving weather information via the SSB radio. The good news is that the forecast gives settled weather for almost a week. This really helps as many of the anchorages here and in our next destination, the Surin Islands, are very open. Due to the light winds there is little prospect of sailing to Surin but we hope to do the 50 mile journey over 2 days and stop overnight at Koh Taichi.

Paul and Susie

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