Underwater Koh Tao

We explored the underwater world with New Heaven Dive School and realized why this Island is so popular with new divers.  The water has spectacularly clear visibility and there are many good shallow dives around the Island perfect for beginners and for teaching classes.  The rock formations around the Island continue underwater which makes for some cool dive sites but there is not much live coral and the diversity of fish is relatively small so you can learn them /see them all within a dive or two.  There have been whale shark sightings lately in the area and yesterday many of the divers on our boat saw two but our group dropped in the wrong place and missed them - bummer. But it was still fun hanging out in the blue waiting and waiting....


The Koh Tao reefs are not nearly as diverse as the reefs on Apo Island and Moalboal in the Philippines. Sorry we do not have pictures but our camera has been on the fritz and we have taken it to the shop so we don't have any underwater photos from our dives.
 
We have gone snorkeling in a few of the bays near our hotel. The water here is between 86 - 92 degrees - it literally feels like a bathtub in some of the bays. Some bays are nice with good coral growth and fish life. And some are filled with dead corals covered in algae, a remnant of a coral bleaching event in 1998. In fact, the corals in many parts of the Gulf of Thailand have been suffering from several bleaching events in the last decade or so and many reefs have not recovered.

There is an organization called "Save Koh Tao" on the Island that has a marine conservation branch and the leader of the branch - Chad Scott - also runs a conservation program/class at New Haven Dive School. Many of the people we were diving with on the Island were taking this class, they were learning the species, surveying the reefs and working on building artificial reefs around the Island.  There are 9 artificial reefs that have been built around Koh Kao and one uses a low electrical current to encourage new coral growth. 

To see more images from Koh Tao, check out our Web Album.