Too Short Scuba Diving

BY CARLY

Tink, tink, tink. Our friendly Irish scuba diving guide, Gareth, was rapping on his tank with a metal clip so he could get our attention. He pointed to a pair of cute butterfly fish and then made the sign for one by locking his thumbs together and flapping his fingers. A butterfly fish is a oval-shaped fish with brown lining its top and bottom fins. It has a streak of white and black on its tail and an OREO pattern of black and white on its face.  I liked the way that the butterfly fish wiggled their way through the water.  It looked like someone had taken a slow motion video of them and placed it in the sea.

I had just seen a banner fish to my right.  It was black and white striped with a long, black, banner-like top fin with a yellow tail.  

I was staring at it while I was swimming.  I didn't realize I was swimming strait toward something else...a big yellow something. I looked up and had to take a sharp left turn to avoid smacking strait into a large head of coral. 

I had been distracted, so I had to swim as fast as I could to catch up to the others.

        Gareth was unraveling his large pink “Divers Below” blow-up sausage.  The sausage is a long, pink, inflatable cloth balloon that is used to let boats know that there are divers ascending.  He let it float up to the surface. Then he gave us the thumbs up which meant “go up”. We pressed the buttons on the tops of our little tubes and we started to rise. Fifteen seconds later, our heads popped up to the surface. I couldn’t believe that we had been diving for forty minutes when it had only felt like ten!  I stuck my snorkel in my mouth and headed back to the boat. 

Scuba Diving in Koh Tao, Thailand

By Perrin

Koh Tao is a tiny beautiful island in Thailand and is famous for its beautiful scuba diving and snorkeling. To get to the island, you have to fly to Koh Samui, a bigger island south of Koh Tao. Then you take a ferry from Koh Samui to Koh Tao. Koh Tao isn’t as populated or touristy as Koh Samui, but it has many foreigners who come for scuba diving, snorkeling and the beautiful island scenery. We were some of them.

        

When my uncle E-pi, Carly and I had settled into our hotel room and my parents into theirs, we rented mopeds and drove down to the main town in Koh Tao, where the boats dock, to rent snorkel equipment and arrange scuba diving for the next day.

        The next morning, we got to the scuba shop after a great breakfast at a café called “Zest,” feeling a little nervous. My parents were already there because they were doing a diving refresher course.  A woman walked up to us and happily said, “Hi! I’m Sarah and I’m going to be your instructor today.” She brought us upstairs to a little room and taught us the rules of scuba diving and about the equipment. Then we tried on the gear to see what size we were. When everybody was ready and all the equipment was in the boat, we got into a small long tail boat that took us to a dive boat. We were going diving at a place called “Japanese Gardens,” and on our way to the site, Sarah told us about it. She explained that we would see many different kinds of fish and since we couldn’t talk underwater, we would have to use hand signs to communicate and to describe to each other what kind of fish we saw. She told us that there were TONS of Sargent Major fish, little black and white and yellow striped fish, and little fish that nibbled your dead skin. 

She also told us about trigger fish that are the shape of a football but much bigger and have a fin that goes up and down when they are angry or scared.  If you notice a trigger fish with a fin that is going up and down, you don’t want to go too close. If the fish feels threatened, it might charge and bite with its round, funny buckteeth.

        When we were finally all ready in our scuba suits and vests and tanks, we jumped in the water.

  

It was about 10 meters deep, so I felt a little scared, but once I looked down and saw the beautiful fish, I wasn’t scared anymore.  We then swam to the beach where we could stand in the water. We went over the rules again and the usage of our equipment and then started swimming deeper to where the bigger coral and fish were.

Going over the rules

Carly

Me

Carly

My uncle E-pi

Me

        

It’s surprisingly difficult to balance under water and to control your buoyancy so you don't hit any coral, so Sarah had to hold on to our tanks and guide us at the beginning. We saw beautiful sea anemones with fish that look like clownfish swimming amongst the anemone’s tentacles. 

 A sea anemone

A barrel sponge

A fake clownfish in a sea anemone

There were also corals that looked like bonsais, and that is why the dive site was called Japanese Gardens. There were banner fish, angelfish, butterfly fish, rabbit fish, parrot fish and thousands of other tiny, colorful fish. 

A big Grouper

A banner fish

On my second dive we were lucky enough to see a moray eel! It swam all the way out of the rock, a behavior that apparently is rare. There was also a huge trigger fish that was a little scary. Almost every square foot of coral had little Christmas Tree worms that look like little colorful Christmas trees stuck to the rock. When something goes close to them or if you disturb the water around them, they immediately suck themselves into the coral and disappear. They are all kinds of colors but most often they are orange, yellow, purple, blue, or tan. I loved waving the water around them and watching them retreat into the coral. 

Christmas tree worms

We didn't see many sea stars, but the one kind that we did see was called the Indian Cushion sea star. It was given that name because it actually does look like a cushion in a vague shape of a star. 

Indian cushion sea star

Everything underwater was unbelievably beautiful and looked like it came out of a movie!

       Scuba diving was such a fantastic experience and I am so glad we tried it in Koh Tao. Although there were some difficult things about diving, overall it was amazing to breath underwater like a fish. It was also a chance to meet new people from different countries and learn about them and how they got into diving. Most of the people on our boat were British, Scottish and Irish, so we heard a lot of different English accents.  I am looking forward to diving again some time in the future!

My dad

My mom and dad

The Wonders of Halong Bay

By Perrin

   When we arrived at Halong Bay on Saturday the 4^th of May, we unloaded our bags from the bus and boarded the small motorboat that would take us to the mother boat: The Valentine. Our small boat was about 30 feet away from the Valentine when we started to hear a drum playing a beat, something like a slow drum roll, welcoming us aboard. 

We got out of the motorboat to find the whole crew waiting to help us onto the boat. The Valentine had 5 cabins, 4 of them on the lower deck and 1, the King Suite, on the upper deck along with the bar, the dining space, the public bathroom and some couches. On the outside top deck, there were some lounge chairs and tables, and best of all, a heavenly view of the beautiful and numerous limestone karsts and the shimmering sunset of Halong Bay.

Halong Bay is a beautiful bay with almost 2,000 islands, and is located in the north east of Vietnam. It looks like it could come out of a Chinese painting or a fantasy movie. Halong Bay is a big tourist attraction and the Vietnamese believe that it is also one of the seven wonders of the world. 

      
One of the places that is visited most in the bay is a huge cave called the Surprise Cave and tourists come from everywhere to see it. It is made up of three large chambers and is located inside one of the many islands. Nobody lives on the islands in Halong Bay except for one lady with three goats whose ancestors lived there so the government is letting her stay.

        Halong Bay seems almost magical, especially a lagoon we visited. There was only one entrance to this lagoon; a long pitch black cave that fills up with water at high tide but is only half full at low tide so that kayaks can just fit through.  It took us about 10 minutes to kayak through. The lagoon was small and felt like it was in a fairy tale.  It seemed like we were the first ones to discover it in its own little world. The lagoon is only one example of the many wonders of Halong Bay.

Entering the tunnel into the lagoon.

In the lagoon.

  As we got situated on the boat after we arrived and ate an elaborate lunch, the boat started heading out amongst the many little islands of Halong Bay. After about 3 hours of slow cruising, we stopped right outside a floating village, got in some kayaks, and kayaked in to see the community. A floating village is a community of people all living in floating houses. The houses we saw were very simple, made of bamboo and wood, and were floating on Styrofoam blocks or empty plastic water tanks. The biggest houses were about the size of a big American dining room, and the small ones were the size of a large American bathroom. Most of the houses had wooden porches where the families washed all the dishes and hung out, but the inhabitants went to the bathroom in the back of their house right into the ocean.

Under most of the houses were big nets in which the people farmed fish to sell at the market. Once they were big enough, the fish were sold at the mainland markets and provided the fishermen’s main income.  The result of this farming was that the water in and around the village was polluted, and we learned that the government was trying to force some of the families to go back to the mainland because of water pollution. As we kayaked through the village we noticed that the water was murky and filled with trash.  I would definitely not have wanted to swim in it!

In the village, there were two long rows of houses that were anchored off the shore to provide protection from the weather. The children had lots of freedom and we saw many of them rowing boats around with their feet. One boat had a girl that looked about 8 years old rowing and her little brother, about 4, was in the front playing with a huge knife. Families in the Upper Valley would never allow their kids to do that. Every house had at least 1 rowboat, just like most people in our community have at least 1 car. 

As well as the floating houses, there was a floating school. The 80 kids that lived in the village could go to class there from grades 1-5, though we were told that there were some 15 year olds that were in 5^th grade. 

The floating school

There were also small market boats that sold food and goods. 

In the center of the village there was a small barge where people could buy drinking water to fill the tanks in their houses.
Our afternoon was spent jumping from the 2^nd floor of our boat into the water, showering and then doing a fantastic Master Chef cooking contest in which the kids competed against my mom and dad. Diep (pronounced Zee-up), our guide, taught us how to make two Vietnamese dishes, a shrimp and pomelo salad, and vegetable spring rolls with a dipping sauce.  Then, from our memory, we had to try to make them. Bob, Elisabeth and one of the crewmembers were the judges and judged the food in terms of its appearance and taste. We won the contest for both dishes!

The dinner that night was served on a white and red tablecloth, with red and pink rose petals sprinkled over the table. Seven courses later, feeling very spoiled, we stumbled off to bed and fell asleep.