Turned out my last comment about dive center density on Phi Phi was an understatement. Every other shop on "main street" was a dive center who arranged local dive trips, as well as speed boat trips to Hin Daeng and Hin Muang 60 km away from Phi Phi. The different dive centers have a "price agreement" on dive trips and Padi courses, so you don't have to worry about price when picking a operator. We ended up diving with Visa divers, after the two first guys we talked to turned out to be Norwegian and Swedish.    

On Tuesday we went on a local dive trip and had one dive at Bida Nok and one at Palong/Maya North. The local diving at Phi Phi turned out really good. We had good visibility and saw a few things we didn't see on our Similan trip, like cuttle fish, black tip reef shark and sea turtles. The dives where also a bit shallower (around 15m) so we had around 60 minutes bottom time on each dive.

After the first dive we had lunch a bit north of Maya Bay, famous from the movie "The Beach". One of the dive masters tipped me about a spot where you had a good chance of seeing black tip reef sharks, so after a quick lunch I grabbed my fins and snorkel and had a look… At first I didn't see any sharks, and I was just about to swim back to the boat when to black tips cruised in at about 4-5m depth. I followed the sharks for a bit, who swam back to their friends. At most I had 7 black tips, ranging from 40cm to about 150cm in length cruising below me at a bout 5-6m depth.  We briefly saw one black tip on our last dive in the Red Sea last summer, but this was just amazing! We decided to start the second dive at the spot where I saw the black tips, and then swim over to Palong. We got some brief sightings of the black tips while diving, but they're really shy and don't like the sound of bubbles when you dive. It's much easier to get close to the black tips if you're snorkeling.



On Wednesday we decided to dive at the King Cruiser wreck, half way between Phuket and Phi Phi. It's a little farther away, so we used a speed boat to get there. The dive was OK, a bit current and bad visibility, but it was my first wreck dive so still exciting. The second dive at Shark Point turned out really good! Great visibility and tons of life under water, among other things a full grown leopard shark swimming freely in the water. They're really gracious swimmers with their long tail. We ended the day with a dive at Maya South (south of "The Beach"). We swam along the mountain wall at around 20-25m. We saw a bunch of nudie branches in various colors, as well as a huge lobster (wonder what you have pay for a one like that on the marked..?). The dive site is also known as "Whale Shark Wall", but the odds of actually spotting one are really small. At the end of the dive we actually found a group of 10 huge Cobias, a fish that normally follows either Whale Sharks or Manta Rays, but unfortunately we didn't see any.

We had booked an early flight from Phuket to Singapore Friday morning, and had to leave Phi Phi on the afternoon ferry to get to Phuket Thursday evening. This meant that we didn't have time to go diving Thursday. In stead we followed up on a tip we got from the Norwegian instructor on another good place to sport black tip reef sharks. The best time to spot black tips is early in the morning, so we got up around 0700 and walked all the way to the end of long beach (about 20min walk). The site is also known as Hin Pae, and many tour operators offer "black tip reef shark safaris" to this place, with a "money back guarantee" that you'll see a shark. You don't have to pay the operators to go snorkeling at Hin Pae, you can simply rent snorkeling gear for 100 THB a day and walk there you self, or take taxi boat. The guy from Vista divers who tipped us about the place said that people often goo too far from shore, or too deep, to see the black tips. Turned out he was right again. At about 1.5-2m depth, just 50-60m from shore we found a group of black tip reef sharks cruising and looking for small fish for breakfast. I guess we saw about 6-8 different sharks, ranging in size from 40-50cm to 150-160cm. The shark didn't seem to care too much about us, so we could get pretty close before they moved away. Just amazing!



For more photos check out Heges updated Thailand photo set on Flickr.