Back in the blue

The season is slowly catching momentum here on Koh Lanta. Friends and colleagues meeting up again at restaurants, schools, dive centers and on the dive boats. New staff members are introduced. It’s a happy crowd with expectations for the upcoming months.

After a summer of nice diving in Sweden and the Mediterranean, I do my first dives for the season on beautiful Koh Bida Nok and Hin Bida, followed by a day at Koh Haa. It’s an Advanced Open Water course, five dives to broadening the students experience and knowledge of diving.

Bida Nok is at its best, crystal clear water, no current and an abundance of life as we do the Peak Performance Buoyancy dive, playing with weights, hovering around, laughing the mask full and pausing to watch a sea krait pass by, or a particular pretty dotted box fish nearby.

At Hin Bida we do a Fish ID, identifying what we see to read further about fishes amazing characteristics on the boat later.
Schools of Glass fish and fusilier in thousands are drifting, moving like clouds between the corals. We get to watch the amazing propulsion of a cuttle fish, when suddenly, a beautiful leopard shark slowly approaches us and pass close by.

The second day at Koh Haa, we do a deep dive to 28m outside Koh Haa#4, checking what happens with the colors at depth, then visiting the clownfish and get to follow a Peacock Mantis shrimp run over the sand.

A navigation dive and a drift dive later, the world has another PADI Advanced Open Water Diver! Congratulations Samantha!

I love my work!

 

Joachim Schmidt

Weird Creature of the month – November

Cuttlefish are marine animals of the order Sepiida. They belong to the class Cephalopodan (which also includes squid, octopuses, and nautiluses). Despite their name, cuttlefish are not fish, but molluscs.

Cuttlefish have an internal shell (the cuttlebone), large W-shaped pupils, and eight arms and two tentacles furnished with denticulate suckers, with which they secure their prey. They generally range in size from 15 cm (5.9 in) to 25 cm, with the largest species, Sepia apama, reaching 50 cm in mantle length and over 10.5 kg in weight.

Cuttlefish eat small molluscs, crabs, shrimp, fish, octopuses, worms, and other cuttlefish. Their predators include dolphins, sharks, fish, seals, seabirds and other cuttlefish. Their life expectancy is about one to two years. Recent studies indicate that cuttlefish are among the most intelligent invertebrates. Cuttlefish also have one of the largest brain-to-body size ratios of all invertebrates. They are sometimes referred to as the chameleon of the sea because of their remarkable ability to rapidly alter their skin color at will. Cuttlefish change color and light polarisation to communicate to other cuttlefish and to camouflage themselves from predators.