I may have gone through a tsunami warning on the Thai island of Koh Lanta last week, but I also got to have the most spectacular scuba dive I’ve ever done in my five years of diving. It was my last dive of the week – I’d been on Lanta on assignment for Asian Diver magazine, reporting on the condition of the sites in the wake of December’s tsunami. I’d just got a last-minute placement onto the Blue Planet Divers boat to go out to Hin Daeng and Hin Muang, two mid-ocean pinnacles. These were famed for visits by manta rays and, very occasionally, the holy grail of Indo-Pacific diving, the creature every diver wants to see, the biggest fish in the world – the whale shark. All through the week I’d heard tantalising reports from staff at other dive shops that they’d seen mantas out here – but I was determined not to get my hopes up. I’d been to Hin Daeng and Hin Muang (Red Rock and Purple Rock, in case you’re wondering) twice before, once last year and one a few weeks previously on a liveaboard. Both times it was murky, with strong currents – and not even a hint of a manta ray. I was quite convinced my bad luck would continue.
After a pleasant three hour cruise out to the two remote pinnacles, Blue Planet’s director Laurent and I dropped in before everyone else. The water was much clearer than previous times, at least 20 metres visibility – and I could see straight across to the top of Hin Muang’s pinnacle, just a few metres below the surface – over which was passing the unmistakable stealth-bomber shape of a manta ray. I couldn’t believe it. Laurant and I shot off towards the pinnacle, finning hard to get across as soon as possible so we could see the manta before it disappeared. But we needn’t have worried. Not only did the manta stay hovering around the pinnacle, lazily gliding around the rock at around 10 metres, passing out into the blue and then appearing again seconds later behind us, but it brought several of its friends as well. Over the next 60 minutes we were surrounded by no less than five manta rays, each of them seemingly unphased by the gaggle of bubblemaking lunatics in their midst – they passed around us, beneath us, and over us – having a six metre wide manta pass over your head so the sun gets blacked out and all you can see is the dazzling white of their underside is not something you forget.
It’s easy to see why sailors originally called them devilfish – if you didn’t know they were harmless plankton eaters, their huge size and black cowl-like shape would seem very scary indeed. One of the mantas had several pilot fish attached to its underside, looking spookily like a cluster of bombs as it cruised by us. But it’s hard to see mantas as sinister when you witness their grace in the water, their massive bulk moving effortlessly through the water guided by the fluid grace of their wings. After the first twenty minutes or so of being completely gobsmacked that I was even in the water with these things, I began to distinguish between them, realising each had their own markings – one had white flashes across its black top, another had its tail missing, a third had a remora attached directly to its mouth. They moved around us seemingly sedately, but try to keep pace with one and you soon realised they moved extremely fast. I found it hard to keep count, to be sure I was counting a different one from what I seen before – until, hovering at one end of the pinnacle, I suddenly saw all five appear in formation, doing the manta equivalent of a fly-by. Spectacular doesn’t even begin to describe it.
We’d spent the dive relatively shallow and so were down for around an hour. As we headed back to the buoyline and started our safety stop at five metres, we were all still looking back to the pinnacle and watching the mantas, who were still cruising around its apex. I momentarily looked down into the water directly below me – and almost spat out my regulator. I thought I was hallucinating. There below me was the creature I’d longed to see for three years whilst underwater – a whale shark. It was a good 20 metres below us but perfectly visible, it’s massive body with its distinctive blunt head, blue-grey sheen and white spots. I grabbed Kate, the nearest diver to me, all decorum gone, babbling and pointing. As one the rest of us on our safety stop started following the whale shark mindful not to dip back under 6 metres again. We got to see it for another few seconds and then it disappeared back into the depths as suddenly as it had appeared. It didn’t matter. We had seen a whale shark!
Emerging back onto the boat with a grin the width of the ocean, I realised I’d just done my dream dive. That I hadn’t expected any of it somehow made it all the sweeter. But I also realised that no-one was going to believe me. “5 manta rays and a whale shark? Yeah riiiiight”. It didn’t matter. I knew it was true. And there was little real pleasure to be gained from bragging about it – it was all about the memories of what we’d just witnessed. I won’t be forgetting this dive for a long long time.
Special thanks to Laurent at Blue Planet Divers and to Ting, Beer and King at Go Dive, two great dive outfits on Koh Lanta. And to Rob Lee, dive instructor extraordinaire.
More on manta rays:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia | Open Directory
