Diving in Koh Lipe is phenomenal unless you unluckily choose the 3 week period the coral spawns. But, in search of macro critters, the viz was little more than an annoyance and detraction from the gorgeous corals and scenery. Nonetheless, I was able to increase my nudibranch count and get a lot of 1:1 attention from my DM. In this video, I introduce the Pegasus Sea Moth, a bottom dweller and share some information about it which I think you will enjoy. They are bizarre creatures! Enjoy!
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The narrator shares their diving experience in Koh Lipe, highlighting the gear setup process, the unique phenomenon of annual coral spawning, and encounters with rare marine life like the dragon seamoth and the scenic \"Stonehenge\" rock formations.
First thing I'm gonna do is grab my booties and stick them in water to eliminate any possibility
of having scorpions or centipedes in them, which is a major problem here.
How do you know if it's in it?
I still don't want to be stung. It's okay, you think?
But we never know.
Thankfully I have to turn it inside out.
The water would take them out, right? Seriously, they're that robust?
All right, carrying my gear out to the boat. I'm going with Max. Max is an amazing divemaster
who loves nudibranchs as much as I do and can find everything, so I'm really excited.
Just me and Max, which means I get maximum time on the animals.
So some of you have asked how difficult it is to set up gear, and for someone who
is experienced it takes about, I don't know, two or three minutes.
Grab yourself a tank, grab yourself a BCD. This is your BCD, a buoyancy control device,
so that allows you to adjust your air and buoyancy underwater, and then your regulator.
So you've got a regulator for yourself, and then this is called an octopus, just in case
the buddy that you have runs out of air or low on air or has an issue, you can share that from
your own tank. And then this here is the pressure hose to put air into the tank,
and that is my gauge to tell me how much air I have in the tank. So pretty easy setup. Probably
total weight of that is maybe 10 pounds. I'm renting gear now, so I don't have an integrated
weight system, so I'm carrying the weight around my waist, so I put on about six pounds.
And there, that's one of the best parts about diving.
Hands down, it's always great to be diving, but we arrived in Kolipe in the middle of the annual
coral spawning. Coral spawning is basically the reef having sex. It's when coral polyps
simultaneously release egg and sperm bundles into the ocean for external fertilization.
This release creates an overall ugly green color underwater and takes visibility from 100 feet
down to, in some cases, 8 to 10 feet. Thankfully, most recreational divers don't want to dive in
this condition, so most of my dives were one-to-one with the Divemaster. Getting lost
was never an issue. With a large group diving in these conditions, it would be a nightmare.
And since I love macro, the spawning doesn't really impact what I'm trying to see,
but it does change the overall experience.
The dragon seamoth is a freaky little bottom-jawing fish living on the sand. At a maximum
size of six inches, this odd little creature looks more like a giant insect or a flightless bird
than a fish. The seamoth is usually seen in pairs, with pairs forming very long bonds.
To rid themselves of offensive organisms, seamoths regularly shed their skin in one whole piece,
as often as every five days. The movement of a seamoth is highly unusual,
using its pectoral fins to walk or scurry across the seabed. And to feed,
they extend their tube-like mouth and, like a vacuum, suck in small invertebrates.
Being a good diver, filling out my dive log. Very excited. We'll be doing number 887 here,
next dive. Not a bad spot for my surface interval. Just finished first dive. I think
this is the first time I've ever had two dive instructors with me on a dive. I got to see some
really great things. Some nudibranchs that I hadn't seen before, and just some other great
critters. Some sea ladybugs as well. That was really cool, first time seeing those. So a bunch
new things. And this will be my last dive of the trip. So right now we're on a dive surface
interval, and that's about an hour in time. So we've got about 30 minutes left before we get back.
For our second dive, we went back to Cote d'Along to dive Stonehenge, one of the most famous and
beautiful sights near Cluipe. Resembling the famous Stonehenge in the UK, upright slabs of
rock play host to large schools of fish and gorgeous soft corals. The happy anemones and
their resident fish are jaw-droppingly beautiful, with a backdrop of bright purple and white
soft corals. It's no wonder this is a favorite among divers.
