Scuba Geek

Find out about scuba diving Thai Wrecks with ThaiWreckDiver.com February 23, 2006

Posted by Andy Carroll in : WreckDiving , trackback

I saw that divehappy had been talking about ThaiWreckDiver today and so I took a look. Wow, what a packed website and I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it before.

Chris says this about the site;

Both the Khram and the Hardeep are amongst the wrecks featured on ThaiWreckDiver.com, a comprehensive overview of Gulf Of Thailand wrecks put together by Steve Burton, the resident Wreck Diver and Engineer at Pattaya’s Mermaids Dive Centre. Steve is well known in the dive community as an authority on Thai shipwrecks and this site is a great example of the effort he has put into researching each of the wrecks that have been discovered so far. This research is important beyond the enjoyment of scuba diving - several of the wrecks are war graves, like the submarine USS Legarto, and their discovery and respectful exploration by tech scuba divers has allowed families to provide a fitting memorial to those who died.

Steve has put together a great website here with plenty of information for the recreational diver and also some for the more adventurous scuba divers who enjoy decompression (yeah right ) and using trimix in his ‘deep’ section

At a depth 85meters/ 280ft This is the deepest dive site in the Gulf of Thailand, and is for full TRIMIX certified divers only. Sunlight rarely permeates down to the bottom here, and the use of Both Hypoxic TRIMIX (at this depth), multiple torches, multiple computers, and formal technical diver training should be considered the minimum equipment and experience necessary to survive this dive. The dive site is also in an area of very strong currents (maybe the strongest in the Gulf), AND is also an inland waterway with a heavy daily traffic of oil and gas tankers who’s hulls reach down well into your top 4 stops. Oh, and I forgot to mention the unexploded bombs littering the sea bed here in what is labeled on the chart as an ‘explosives dumping ground’. A better idea of the strength of currents at this site can be gauged by the fact that it is not unusual to meet the 1 meter diameter teardrop buoy submerged by current at your 15meter stop. Deploying the lift bag at this point to ‘drift on the bag’ with the current could result in surfacing either in Pattaya or Cambodia depending on which way the currents running once the ’stops’ are completed if dived during a ’spring run’. I have been ‘officially lost at sea’ during such a dive, returning home someway up the coast after luckily bumping into an Ocean going Deep sea trawler. May I humbly suggest this site is dived at slack water only.

Good site, well worth a visit. Thanks to Chris at Divehappy for pointing it out.