Eight Mile Rock

Choosing a dive centre

While in Koh Lipe, I did two dives with Forra Diving, located at the beach end of the Walking Street.

I chose to dive with them for a few reasons:

• Azri (Malaysian) whom I had enquired with, was super helpful in explaining the various sites, in particular that much of diving around here is for macro (the small stuff) which I have difficulty seeing in my old age. He recommended Eight Mile Rock as my only choice.
• They display their upcoming dives on a board outside the shop which meant that I could see when Eight Mile Rock came up.
• Roman (French) whom I made a second enquiry and signed up, was super pleasant.

Price-wise most shops come in at THB2800 to 3000 for 2 dives including all equipment.  Pricing here seems to include equipment rather than without, as in some places.

Diving Eight Mile Rock

We met up at the dive centre at 0800 and loaded up the longtail boat to take us to the large dive boat.  With a couple of customers turning up late, we didn’t get moving till 0845.

It took about 1h20 to get to our dive site where we did two dives.  Both dives were very similar.

We descended by holding onto a rope to a buoy.  As I don’t often descend this way, I had to be reminded to deflate my BCD.

Once at the bottom, we went around and in between the various rocky mounds that make up the dive site.  We had been warned to expect greenish (or yellowish) tinge to the water with moderate visibility.  But, it is meant to be due to plankton which also means rich sea life.  Someone who photographed the dives commented that the photos weren’t very good.

We saw:

• Amazing schools of jackfish,
• Large schools of barracudas,
• Large schools of batfish
• Some giant groupers and lionfish,
• A moray on each dive, and
• Lots of various tropical reef fish.

We went to a depth of 30m as per the rules, but there had been suggestion during the briefing, of going to around 40m but one participant wasn’t keen.

With two dives, surface interval and long cruises each way, we returned back to Lipe around 1500.

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Various notes

I developed blisters even though the fins were not super tight.  I had planned on bringing socks on the dive but had forgotten.

One English participant was an experienced dive instructor.  He mentioned that he doesn’t get jobs as easily as the continental Europeans who have more than one language.

The dive centre doesn’t accept credit card payments.  They only accept cash, Wise bank transfer or QR Scan and Pay.  The last option worked well with my Malaysian bank.

My divemaster learnt to dive only 9 months ago.  He loved it so much and stayed on to train as a divemaster.  On the other hand, I’ve been diving 15 years and still feel new to the game, since I do it so infrequently.