I began this year by jumping off a boat, sinking 25 meters under the waves and watching Manta Rays glide over my head.
I’ve always likened diving as travelling to an alien world, populated by the most amazing, mind bending creatures. Seen a crinoid walking over a rock, or a cuttlefish making an hypnotic display of colours or ten thousand glistering fish swimming in unison and then exploding in a myriad points of light around you is an experience so detached of what we may find on dry land as to require a new comprehension of what life is capable of achieving.
I had a camera with me but I didn’t take too many photos or videos, I was simply enthralled by the show. I put together those in a short clip but it just can’t make justice to the experience.
I think this particular Manta Ray was about four meters across, that’s about the size of a small car, the largest ones can grow to almost twice that size. In any case it’s the largest fish I’ve ever encountered, and come to think of it the largest animal I’ve ever came close to in the wild, I could have actually extend my arm and touch it in several occasions.
Koh Bon is a great place to find Mantas, this season they seem to be very abundant. Besides mantas it’s a nice “wall dive”.
I used a Canon G11 with an Inon S-2000 strobe (not that the strobe is much use for a subject like this) I wish I had borrowed a friend’s GoPro Hero camera for this trip, the image quality is not great but it takes good HD videos and the domed lens gives a fantastic wide angle view, would had been fantastic when the mantas swam overhead.
They seem to be, or at least they don’t mind having divers around while they go on their own business. Fun fact, manta rays have the largest brains of the shark family; so who knows, maybe they are genuinely curious.
I did not know that fun fact! Animals like that just facinate me. Well, ALL animals do, actually, but they are so… alien in design. Would love to learn more about them.
I uploaded an overly excessive number of photos from the dive trip to my Picasa albums, in case you may want to see what else I found in the Andaman Sea. All in all I took about 800 pictures in 15 dives. :eek:
I would love to swim with manta rays. I have, on occasion, seen many hundreds from the air as they “fly” through the shallows along some of the more remote parts of Western Australia and wished I was down there with them. I think that snorkelling/diving is one of the best activities you can do, so serene yet with a little tinge of anticipation and even fear as you catch glimpses of large saw toothed shapes with distinctive dorsal fins prowling the area. I am envious of your encounter!
Are you sure those where manta rays? I’ve never heard of gatherings of that size for the species, if so it must be impressive.
Here in Thailand I have never seen a shark while diving or snorkeling (well, one whale shark but that hardly counts as a shark :p). I’ve seen a few in Malaysia, it’s indeed thrilling but not fearful at all; although if they would had been great whites or tiger sharks I probably would had needed a clean wetsuit after the dive.
Yeah definitely manta rays. I say hundreds but they were spread over hundreds of miles of coastline as well so it’s not like they were all in a school or something. Would probably see five or six along a small beach and then similar numbers around other beaches. It’s something I only saw once in those numbers, even though I flew that coastline many times.
My only shark encounters have been with black and white tipped reef sharks. Mostly harmless they say and yes thrilling is a better word for it.
What’s Koh Bon like?