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Part 2: The imaginary manta Next morning we did our first dive at Koh Bangu near Similan Island #9. It was an easy dive around a pile of boulders and gave Charlie the chance to check us out. We also got our first taste of Charlie's dive briefings. He told us it would probably be our only dive from the boat and the rest would be from the dinghy. We didn't know how seriously to take him after the events of the previous evening. The rest of the dives were from the dinghy, for the most part. We are unsure why. In many cases the dive site was in the wide-open sea and Charlie would still have us clamber down into the dinghy just to drop us 50m from the boat. Maybe he thought our swimming and navigation skills were on a par with his forecasting. Anyway, diving from dinghy provided valuable entertainment for his crew. We entered the water with picture- perfect backrolls... then scrambled back into to the inflatable dinghy with all the ease and grace of beaching walruses. Later that day we anchored at Koh Bon, a site that offers a fair chance of a manta-ray encounter. There is a ridge running down into deeper water that mantas are known to frequent. Jase, Paul, Richard, Mary and I headed down to about 25m and waited for two or three minutes. Jase then signaled that he was going to stay on the ridge and the rest of us could do what we wanted. For some unknown reason I deferred the decision to Mary. You can guess what happened next, but I will finish the story anyway. I turned to Mary and signaled the decision was hers. She suggested we go up the ridge and around the corner. Jase stayed on the ridge with Paul and Richard. We swam off, we saw a turtle, we saw an octopus, we photographed a nudibranch... and then we headed back to the boat. "Did you see the manta?" said Marc. "Did you see the manta?" said Nadia. "Why on earth did you leave?" said Jason, making it sound as if we had passed up an opportunity to become independently wealthy. Arrgh! Later on we went for a shallow dive in the bay around the corner from the ridge. Mary and I checked out the caves along the shore where a pair of nurse sharks had been seen earlier. No sharks, of course. We then saw Willem and Ida heading back towards the boat, staring intently at their compasses. When we got back to the boat, it turned out that once again we'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Willem and Ida swam out to sea, practicing their navigation, the manta decided to pay them a visit. We questioned them in disbelief, but when Ida described it as a "large, short-bodied creature" we knew they'd seen the real thing. Grrr! Those of you who have met Mary may know she has an imaginary boyfriend. He doesn't dive, he doesn't come out drinking and few people believe he actually exists (Paul claimed to have met him, but I saw a sum of money changing hands). Given the company I was keeping, I would like to believe everyone else saw an imaginary manta... but the photographs suggest otherwise. |
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