The Fryhole

First a note about IE7: I’ve never before seen such a horribly mangled and confusing interface to webpages. Kudos to MS for out-doing themselves once again. At least the pain is spread evenly between the users and the web-developers for this revision. If the web browser is going to be hard to develop for; it should be hard to use as well. It’s only fair. Perhaps there is a setting somewhere to ‘fix’ the interface; but I surely know that I don’t want to open that particular Pandora’s box. Oh, and what interesting render bugs, as well!

Fortunately, today was clear and sunny again — though sorry, still no pictures. Began the day with a wandering down the beach to see the sand crabs that Angela reported yesterday. Took about a 30 minute walk to get down the beach far enough to see them; but see them I did! Most are very tiny, with only the odd larger one. The tiny ones seem to let you get closer to them than the large ones do… as soon as you draw even a little bit close to one of the larger ones it scuttles off into the foam and is lost to the ocean in a few seconds. I guess the little ones are younger and not yet seasoned enough to evade humans with such proficiency.

After that adventure and a brief interlude at the room to get ready we were off to the dive center. Took about a 20-30 minute ride from the resort to the dive center; which is in the Royal Phuket Marina on the east coast of Phuket (opposite coast from the resort). It is a very nice establishment and immediately upon arriving there we jumped aboard the diving speedboat that was all prepped and ready and headed off. The boat moved really quick and about 30 minutes later we were at Shark’s Point and ready to go into the water.

During the first dive of the day (a 1-hour, 17 meter dive), we actually did see a leopard shark — it was very cool; just sitting along the bottom of the ocean and remaining still — perhaps all the divers that were swirling around it were actually scaring it. It was difficult to see because there were so many dive groups around the shark — I’d say about 10-15 divers total, all clustering around the shark. Poor thing, but it really was a sight to see.

While the leopard shark was undoubtedly the hilight of the first dive, we saw quite a few underwater critters as well… there were alot of sea urchins out there, as well as scorpion fish, angel fish, and rock fish. The other rather cool critter we saw we aren’t sure how to identify. It was squid-esque, but it had very short tentacles and a rather large, oblong head around which a fin circled. The dive master tried to close in on it a bit; but when he got too close (a few meters), it suddenly shot off into the ocean… all that was missing was the cloud of ink and it would have been the perfect squid-escape.

For the second dive we went down to a place known as Ko Dok Mai (a 45-minute, 14 meter dive) — it is a towering island of stone (cliffs all the way around), lording over the ocean by something around 50 meters. You dive down the side of these cliffs; and after they enter the water they become the basis for a reef-like environment. There were quite a few sea urchins, though not as many as at Shark Point, and more varied fish — barracuda, parrot fish, grunts, groper, and then scorpion and angel fish again. Living in the little reef were also a fair number of moray eels, which were cool for me to see as I hadn’t yet seen them down under the sea in their habitat. Normally they just sit inside the reef with only a bit of their head visible; so the dive master kept trying to get them to try and bite his finger (they were smaller ones) to draw them out so that we can see, but they didn’t take the bait. We got lucky later, though, and got to see one that was outside of the reef, undulating as he was swimming up it. Very neat.

After diving we returned to the resort, where we sat down and had a meal at the Marriott Cafe, which had fantastic service and wonderful food.  \o/

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 8:08 am and is filed under Reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.