17th of December, after a long time (2 weeks) without diving, here we are again with a full boat this time. We have on board some family members, which will make it even more fun…

We also have a lot of courses to run, 3 specialties, “deep”, “Night” and “Nitrox” for Thierry, he will be busy, for sure! Then 2 “open water” courses for Romain and Caroll Ann.

Our first day was absolutely fantastic through our 4 dives we found, giant puffer fish, octopus, loads of nudis, sponge crabs, and 3 Spanish dancers! What a great start for our new divers…!

28th of November, this is the last day of this trip 3 "Explore Burma", and we will try to make it a good one, first we dive in the crater of a Volcano then we pay a small visit to a local military camp, which looks more like a paradise island if you ask me then we go to square rock, this is where you can get one of the most powerful current you would ever experience in your diving life!

Theses 2 places have a lot to offer, grey reef sharks, turtles, nudibranches , seahorses, longfin cometfish, juvenile shaded batfish, pineapple fish, sea snakes,  blue spotted stingrays, etc.…

There is a lot to see there but you got to know where to look, and that’s what I like about this dive sites…

27th of November, our diving expedition continues.
 while we are diving in the Western Rocky area, we encounter few more frogfishes. It seems like this season is the frogfish’s season as we already found many of them. From one season to the next the fish population varies. We had many ghost pipefish last season, this one is more about seahorse and frogfish, I wonder what the next season will be about…

26th of November, we are going to some of the best dive site in the Mergui archipelago, Seafan forest and Western Rocky. Although we never know what we will find down there, I know it’s going to be good…

Octopus, stonefish, and tunas plus many different shrimps were waiting for us at Seafan forest and frogfish and blotched stingrays at western rocky as well as 2 seahorses and many lobsters… always good to dive theses places…

25th of November, We carry on with our diving expeditions and during the night we cruised to our next dive site.  The waters are teaming with life, it’s absolutely fantastic, cuttle fish, shrimps of all kind, angel fish, lion fish, nudibranches and again great visibility.

The corals are in very good shape, hard and soft, they offer the perfect shelter for all the underwater animals, and they make great pictures as well…

24th of November, we are back at sea for a trip 3"Explore Burma" We are only 7 people onboard which makes the whole experience even more exclusive. We will go to 3 different places on this first day and do 3 dives plus 1 night dive. Exciting program as always.

Our first one is a check dive, to make sure everybody is confortable with their buoyancy after a long time without diving. We still find a frogfish hiding in its white sponge, and a sea snake just passing by, minding it’s own busyness.

For the second dive, we cruise to another place, where we find tunnels/caves. The place offers a very dramatic scenery below the surface as well as above. The entrance of the cave is at 17m and cross the entire island, on the other side the rock is covered with soft corals and it’s loaded with fish! Beautiful.

Dive 3, we have to cruise again, but less than an hour.  Now we are at a place that we discovered only few trips ago and we still have to figure out what is the cave system like…  How exciting?!  We explore bits bu bits and we bump into a massive nurse shark sleeping on the bottom of the cave, Awesome! We take some pictures and it’s time to get out …

The last dive, (night dive) is going to be at the same place but we wont go inside the cave… the outer part is pretty good as well, loads of purple and red soft corals. It’s the perfect place for Spanish dancers to cruise around. We found 3 of them…!

That was a very good day, indeed.

21st of November, we went straight to Richelieu Rock.
Today, the visibility is outstanding, as we go down the mooring line we see a big school of "longfin Batfish" one of my favorite fish. We carry on around the rock, but not after taking many pictures, the Reef is literally covered by huge school of yellow stripe fusiliers and we find ourselves surrounded by barracudas, they are just cruising around while tunas are hunting with rainbow runners and trevallies. It's a never-ending dance, beautiful!

20th of November, we are now at the Southern part of Surin Islands, at Yellow rock and that's the place where you can find The very rare and shy Barramundi! It's a fish that belongs to the Grouper family.
We jump in and there is a very strong current, which makes every move challenging but it's very exciting to see the schooling oriental sweetlips facing it in a plane like formation!
All the reef fish, not strong enough to deal with such strong current are all peeping their head out, which allow us to get very close to them.

19th of November, this is the first day of our Trip 1” best of Thailand” we start with Surin islands, north pass. A mantis shrimp and a very cute juvenile sweet lip are greeting us. The reef is highly populated with moray eels of all kinds.

 6th of November, we jump in very early to have a chance to see the black tips that are living in the crater of a sleeping volcano. On the outside of the crater there a coral wall we like to call seahorse city because we always find seahorses there! Visibility is pretty bad there but it’s still a very good dive site…

As expected we saw 2 black tips reef sharks and 2 seahorses what a great way to start the day and wrap up our last day of diving for this trip 3. 

15th of November. We dive Seafan forest South of Myanmar Archipelago. It’s a magnificent coral reef, which goes down to more than 40 meters and up to 5 meters from the surface. This makes it a wonderful dive site with huge seafan coral up to more than 2 meters high, all over it.

We start our dive up current to be able to reach the swim through side, covered by some purple soft coral. We find there 2 ghost pipe fishes and a couple of harlequin shrimps. What a great start! On our second dive there, we literally bumped into an eagle ray and it’s the hectic time when all fish are hunting, rainbow runners, Jacks, trevallies and barracuda! Absolutely fantastic!

On the 14th of November we continues our expedition in the mergui archipelago towards north twin pinnacle.

We hope to see some mantas, we will do 2 dives there…

Unfortunately, no mantas showed up but we were greeted by 1 leopard shark , a big school of barracuda and a turtle!

The last 2 dives of the day were on South twin were we could play with some swim through and it’s the place for nudibraches!

On the evening we had a great encounter  with dolphins on the surface, awesome!

On the 13th of November, we are still reporting about our dive trip in Mergui Archipelago. Today we visit 4 dive sites around shark cave and it deserves its name today: 2 massive nurse shark are happily sleeping in its bowels! they are between 2 and 3 meters long and we pass next to them to get to the other side of the cave, this is exciting!!!
And for those who didn't have enough, 2 big blotched sting rays were also there!!!
what a dive! we had to do it again at night and everyone was still there, lazily resting on the sandy bottom.

We go again to Burma and for the first day of this trip 3: 6 days/5 nights around the south of Burma archipelago
we dive high rock, steward island, tower rock and spanish garden, our secret spot to find spanish dancers on every dive!
this must be a reproduction center because we can see their eggs quite often there and the spanish dancers come out in the evening for the ball.
During the day we also spotted a ghost pipe fish, first one of the season, yeah!

in the morning we are also lucky to see a pod of dolphin hunting in the bay, I love them, even if they run away when we dive!!!

November 5th 2012
Myanmar diving expedition report: 

4 dives on the way and at Western rocky
dive 1: 7h10, 32m, 42 min, New dive site
dive 2: 11h14, 33m, 45 min, Western Rocky
dive 3: 15h38, 26m, 42 min,  Western rocky
Dive 4: 19h12, 22m, 40 min, Western Rocky


Beside the usual coral reef fishes which we encounter every time we dive in Myanmar. We saw a group of cuttle fish, big file fish and many types of crabs amongst which sponge crabs and spider crabs also called decorator crabs because of the way they use pieces of colorful coral and sponges to dress up.

You can see more pictures about this trip on our facebook album :  
First trip to Burma: awesomeness!!!