Former Sea Bees instructors, divemasters and assistant instructors always like to come back to Sea Bees. Daytrips around Phuket and Khao Lak are good – but even better would be to charter a liveaboard and get away for a few days. That’s exactly what a few of us did.
Alex – a former Marco Polo guide – now working in the Sea Bees office in Chalong,
brought along his diving family: Michael and Rita, and their friends Claudia and Kalle, who works as an instructor in Egypt;
Basti – also a former Marco Polo guide – now working in a real job in Phuket;
Sebastian – a former instructor at Sea Bees – now running his own dive centre in Croatia, came along with his wife Maya;
Mirco – who did his assistant instructor course with Sea Bees, joined us with his girlfriend Gob;
Ruediger and Holm, on holidays to catch up with their good friend – our instructor Stefan – a permanent fixture on Excalibur ;-),
Julie and Muredach – we both used to work as (freelance) instructors for Sea Bees and you might remember me – Julie – from our Amari office until 2009 (I also used to write this blog 😉 ), we’re now living in Ireland and were just back for a holiday in Indonesia and Thailand.
So, we all went on our Genesis for a special trip to Elephant Rock, North Corner, Koh Bon, Koh Tachai and Richelieu and the Boonsung Wreck in January this year.
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We had a few days of fantastic dives, brilliant weather, lovely conditions with no waves, 40m visibility, stunning reefs and very vibrant dives. Even though most of the big fellas stayed away this time, the marine life was fantastic including a hugh shoal of blackfin Barrakudas at Koh Tachai, which surrounded us, didn’t let us go and formed a big dense ball around us. Leopard sharks, seahorse, ghost pipefish, tiger cowries, batfish, turtles, juvenile sweetlips, hunting travellies, a demon stinger stonefish and honeycomb moray eels certainly made up for it! Changing dive times to be the first group in the water to see the reef awakening and sunset diving when the reef was a huge hunting ground without any other divers in the water, gave us a feeling of complete serenity!
It was a fantastic trip – a very nice group of people and great diving conditions in the Similans. It was lovely to be all in the ‘same boat again’, to talk about the good old times, but also to see how people have moved on and are doing really well today.
We look forward to the next ‘ex-staff-trip’ again.
All the best,
Julie & Muredach
