After all our travels, it was finally time to hit the beaches and start diving! We (Brandon) had heard great things about diving in the Similan Islands in Thailand. And the best way to see them is on a live aboard. (A live aboard – or liverboard as some of my friends like to call it – is a boat you stay on where you “Dive. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.” for a few days or even a few weeks!

We booked a trip very last minute, and the boat we found with availability was the Manta Queen 3. This was a 4 day, 4 night trip with up to 30 divers on board. That is a LOT of divers. Most live aboards Brandon does have around 8 divers. So while this was not an ideal option, it was a great way for me to literally test the waters to see if I could handle a live aboard.

Fortunately, seasickness was not an issue, but the parasite I managed to get before getting on the ship did cause a few problems. When I got sick the first night, I thought it was just a bit of seasickness. But when I got sick every day of the trip, I knew it was something else. But even with those issues, I still managed to enjoy the trip and did 10 of the 15 available dives. And luckily those seemed to be the best 10 of the trip – excluding the one with a manta sighting which I did miss.

Here are a few of the fun things we saw during the trip. Remember that I am not a professional photographer or photo editor, and a GoPro can only do so much. These photos include a sweetlips (black, white and yellow), the eggs of a Spanish Dancer nudibranch (purple and lacey looking), an AWESOME seahorse that was bright yellow and covered in spikes, a porcupine fish, some clownfish in an anemone, and some other colorful shots.

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Oh! And I can’t forget this giant jelly that was hanging out with us at the end of one of our dives.

But while we saw some really great stuff, the number of divers on the boat made for a few things we didn’t love. Five minutes before every dive, staff came through the boat banging on the walls shouting, “Dive briefing in fiiiiive minutes.” So if you were napping or relaxing at that time, you weren’t anymore. Also so of the dive sites were pretty small, so even though they did a great job splitting the divers into smaller groups (4-6 people per dive master) there were many dives where we were still navigating around the rest of the group. They also tried to up sell you on everything from new certifications to extra equipment rentals and more.

On the plus side, our time on the boat offered some spectacular views.

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And we had a really nice afternoon on a gorgeous beach!

So while we likely would not recommend this live aboard to more experienced divers, it was a good intro for me. And all-in-all we scraped together a pretty good week, and made some great friends.