SCUBA diving Liveaboard Thailand October 2015

We were on the SCUBA diving  liveaboard Thailand Aggressor for a seven day trip Saturday 10/10/15 until Friday 16/10/15. We did the South  Andaman Sea itinerary the details are at:- http://www.aggressor.com/captainlogsview.php?log=4521

On board was an excellent photographer, Gary, he partnered us on many of the dives and he has a web site with the photographs from trip at:-

http://www.naturalexpressions.com/cgi-bin/photo/search.pl?Type=Andaman

Generally, this was a good trip and the crew and dive staff were exceptional in ensuring a fun diving experience. However, there was a lack of big stuff we just saw 1 shark and 1 turtle. There was plenty of evidence of commercial fishing – every night the horizon was crowded with fish boats with very strong lights to attract squid and prawns. Also, from the lack of even small reef sharks, I suspect there was a lot of shark fishing for shark fin soup. The reefs, although still interesting to dive, are showing signs of overfishing.

Below is

On the first day we saw a school of barracuda:-

Also from the first day diving here’s a couple of photographs in our spot-the-fish series first spot the flounder :-

and then spot the stone fish – a bit more important to spot than the flounder because of the highly venomous spines:-

on the topic of venomous spine here’s a lion fish:-

back to more friendly fish and a group of easy to spot finding Nemo clown fish:-

Day2: ever seen a cucumber have a crap:-

And here’s a video of a stone fish blinking – the fish is difficult to see until it blinks:-

Day3: this parrot fish is getting cleaned by small blue wrasse fish – seems to be enjoying it and certainly it was reluctant to move which made it easy to film:-

Below’s a video of a shoal of yellow snappers and if you look at it closely you will see some Blue cleaner wrasse touting for business but none of the yellow snappers stop to get cleaned – I guess some days the cleaners just strike out.

This is a big dog faced puffer fish – check it out:-

Here’s a video of a cuttle fish mating behaviour, according to Clive the dive master “they are always at it” – the video shows a large male protecting the female in contention from challengers – they are flashing to each other  signalling no doubt the cuttle fish equivalent of “are you looking at my girl friend”.  They are four “Fs” of animal behaviour, fleeing, feeding, fighting and reproduction and is this video we have fighting and reproduction.

I always like the way sea snakes move – looks silky smooth and sinuously sensual – this video shows a banded sea krait checking out the nooks and crannies on the reef looking for prey. The sea krait has  a very poisonous bite but, fortunately, it means of delivery, its fangs, are small and designed only for killing small fish – but don’t let a sea krait chew on you because if  it does manage to deliver its poison it could ruin your whole day or at least the 3 minutes of it you have left.