Mergui Archipelago Dive Sites Quick Look

Good hard and soft corals, seawhips, sponges, crinoids, lyre coral, anemones, everything. A bit like Richelieu Rock, but in so many ways, so much better. The area is so big, it can be dived for several days. There are several dive sites here, some breaking the surface, some underwater. Nearly every square meter is riddled with crevices, nooks and crannies, providing shelter and holdfasts for an enormous volume of fish and invertebrate life. Schools of anchovies and fusiliers dash about avoiding the jacks and bonitos that harass them. In the sand, tube anemones, burrowing sea cucumbers, and varieties of sea stars, and large brown sea anemones serving as hosts for eggshell shrimp, as well as Sebae clownfish. On the reef, hawkfish, gorgonian crabs, basket stars (rarely seen in Thailand), jewel-box urchins, cuttlefish, squid, and cowries. Finally, to marble rays, false and true stonefish, flatheads, Schultz’s pipefish, badger clingfish, tiger-tail sea horses and numerous species of morays. This is also one of the better places to see exotic creatures like harlequin shrimp and harlequin ghost pipefish. Wow. Finally, there is a canyon to the west of the main island which sometimes harbors gray reef sharks, and often you'll find tawny nurse sharks in one of the small caves.

Leopard and white-tip reef sharks inhabit the reef’s outer perimeter, usually in the sandy areas. If the currents are reasonable, swimming deeper will put you in a thick forest of sea fans on the north side. This site tends to attract a wide range of mid-water predators, including rainbow runners, bonito, queenfish, and lots of pickhandle and great barracudas and schooling triggerfish. Soft corals are pretty like they are in Similan. They are visually interesting dive sites, stunning with their rocky boulders and weird topography.

One of the deepest dive sites we have in Myanmar, the water depth around the rock gets to 60m very fast on all four sides. Dense mosaic of small soft corals, orange cup coral and feather stars. Colonies of small, tiger-striped anemones cling to fan corals and gorgonian skeletons; these are seldom seen outside of the Mergui Archipelago. Reef fish are also abundant, especially black-spotted puffers, scorpionfish, spotted hawkfish and blue-ring angelfish and schooling fish like pinjalo snapper and jacks. Really huge giant morays are common as are the jeweled, zebra, fimbriated and white-eyed. It is a good place for sharks and rays, but they are usually very deep, beyond the limits the average diver is trained for. Sometimes you'll see them in the distant blue, but they rarely come close to a diver unless you're below 35m. This is one of the better places to see manta rays. If they are around, they are everywhere as they circle the rock, dancing about.

The most striking natural feature here is a tremendous number of huge, undamaged orange fan corals, mostly below 30m. There are rows and rows of them. Blue-ring angelfish, lionfish and coral trout are among the most common reef fish, in addition to mid-water species like jacks, barracudas and batfish. Leopard sharks are very common here, and almost the only place you see them in Mergui for some reason. They lie in the sand below the main rock, usually in the canyons and are surrounded by huge sea fans. It's quite spectacular. Some people don't love this dive as the currents can be stronger, but if you like currents, you'll love this dive.

Huge fields of orange fan corals, starting at about 30m and continuing to 39m and deeper. A large tunnel running completely through the island, in addition to several smaller caverns and a huge archway. The cavern has species of crabs and shrimp, murex and cowry shells, bigeye snapper and robust fusiliers, along with spiny lobsters. Sometimes tawny nurse sharks lie on the cavern floor. They eat the lobsters so don't take them! Reef fish include blue-ring angelfish, red emperor snapper, red-bar anthias and many varieties of moray eels. Invertebrates include nudibranchs, shellfish, feather stars, anemones and hermit crabs. Even rarities like clawed reef lobsters, harlequin shrimp and frogfish are seen.

The Burma Banks are a series of large underwater flat-topped sea-mounts that lie approximately 180 kilometers (100 nautical miles) northwest of the Similan Islands. The banks' surrounding water is over 350 meters deep and large areas rise to within the depth limits of recreational scuba diving. The name derives from the fact that this 1,500 square kilometer area lies within the exclusive economic zone of Burma. The banks offer some exciting, stimulating diving, but since this is true open-ocean diving, they certainly are not for everyone.

These mountains rise very gradually from the depths and are covered with hard coral growth and large patches of sand. Although the huge plate corals (some of these 'plates' could seat all the knights of the round table easily) are in many areas fantastic, that is not the reason for traveling so far out to sea. The reason is for different types of environments not found in Thailand or in the Mergui Archipelago proper.