Hi Ho Hi Ho - It's off to dive we go!

[Tristan Green]

Just sorting out the last minute stuff like e-mail forwarding and finding some clean t-shirts and laptop/camera/torch chargers to throw in the dive bag before legging it to the airport.

I'm off to dive Burma Banks with a bunch of friends from our club here in Hong Kong over the Lunar New Year holiday (although two of them are actually making the journey from the UK to join us on the boat!).

Woo hoo - 6 days of diving in warm clear waters! :)

I'll have a crack at a trip report when I get back.

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Tristan

[John_C]

Lucky Burger! :rolleyes:

Enjoy and safe diving.

[Paul Renucci]

Maybe not?? It's freezing in the UK right now but what's it really like over there?

[Paul Watts]

I hope it rains!! :cool:

[Neil R]

So do you have extra free days for diving then ? :cool:

[Tristan Green]

Hi,

OK - quick update as I just got back last night and have 10 mins spare during lunch time.

In brief - 8 of us chartered a 60 foot sailing yacht to do a 6 day dive trip around the Mergui Archipelago (southern bit) from Ranong in Thailand.

The Orion was crewed by 'Skip' - Owner and Cook, Thalie - mate and generally helpful in every way, Marcus - DM and Semo - our Burmese 'guide' (Spy). They were all wonderful and somewhat relieved that we all largely knew what we were about with diving and living on a boat for a week. I think they were pretty apprehensive about the whole thing until we turned up and they realised we weren't all complete numpties (just normal numpties :D ).

So the sailing and eating was grand and we were well looked after during our stay but unfortunately the diving wasn't quite what we were expecting. The first 'checkout' dive was akin to a typical dive in HK with 2 m vis and nothing alive to see. Things improved rapidly after this though and we usually had 10 - 20 m vis (sometimes up to 40 m at the pinnacle sites). There was the usual array of reef fish and coral and crawling things but a complete lack of any big fish (okay except for one or two tuna and the occasional spanish mackerel).

We were lucky to see a single leopard shark from the boat while sailing between sites, we all saw some baby sharks in a shallow lagoon while we were kayking and one lucky diver saw a nurse shark on our last dive.

Well there goes the myth that you can see lots of sharks in Burma. I suspect that most of them have ended up in a bowl in Hong Kong :mad: .

Proper trip report will be written after I've unpacked.

Cheers,
Tristan