Castaways Sub-Aqua Club

10th April 2007
Diving Tioman Island

 
I hadn’t been diving since we lived in Thailand, in fact it was in Koh Samui over 2.5 years ago! But it’s like riding a bike, and although I have my equipment here in Malaysia, I hired all the equipment from the dive school, except my mask and trusty dive computer. Simon was my Austrian-Welsh dive buddy, and he is the dive instructor at the Minang Cove Resort.

There are lots of dive sites in Tioman, both reef and wreck diving and there is diving directly off the jetty/beach at Minang Cove, so you don’t even have to get on a boat.

Located off the resort there is a Thai wooden fishing boat which was wrecked some eight years ago in the monsoons. The reef dive sites are centred around lots of soft and hard corals clinging on huge basalt boulders. There is a lot of staghorn coral and dead pieces of this coral make up a lot of the low tidal zone of the beach.

The reefs around Tioman are being devastated by the Crown of Thorns Starfish (a critter I have come across before in the Red Sea). Although I didn’t see any on the diving I did recently, 60% of the local reefs have been eaten and destroyed by the starfish. Our friend Tom, recently qualified as a diver, has been over to Tioman on conservation dives to try and collect the Starfishes and destroy them. The Starfish has lost its natural predator, the Giant Clam – it being fished and eaten/taken by local fishermen.

I saw at least three different species of clownfish (anemonefish or Nemo’s!), including the Tomato anemonefish a lovely deep dark red colour and the Pink anemonefish. My favourite diving is watching these fish swim in and out of their anenomes, and try and scare you away by swimming up to you. There were many different types of Parrotfish, Nudibranchs (sea slugs), damselfish as well as soldierfish and Blue-spotted rays. I saw two of the biggest Pufferfish I have ever seen whilst diving, the Star Pufferfish, which can grow up to 1.2m!

I managed to clock up to dive number 98 by the time I left I Tioman, but that is not as big number as it sounds, as I have been diving for 10 years! So only 10 dives a year on average! But as Tioman Island has our closest dive sites, I think I’ll be back to do some more diving soon.

Amy O’Connor