Close Encounters
Once in a long while, you just want to be able to burn a memory onto the surface of your mind, lest in the passage of time it should dim and fade.
The diving was superb, drifting past batfish, Nemo-like clownfish, turtles, glowing jellyfish, moray eels, tuna and barracuda... For three days we swam in the warmest of seas, astounded at the sheer diversity and alien-ness if the sub-sea life. On the last day we crept up to a leopard shark, asleep on the sandy floor - shattered (obviously after a night of hard partying with his mates), he paid us not a whit of notice. But the last dive....
We sank into a strong current off Koh Bon, with sloping coral reefs to our left, and the great blue expanse of the Indian Ocean to our right. Drifting down to about a hundred feet below, our dive leader pointed excitedly into the darkened mist, and within it we saw this great white shape. Coalescing from the blue, an utterly alien ray glided towards us, before heading back out into deeper waters. I found out later it was a striped eagle ray - a good two metres across. Elated, we motioned to less fortunate divers what we had seen, and then...
From the ocean, this absolutely immense form, white with a mouth big enough to hold two divers, colossal white wings and a dark mottled back, glides towards the coral - and straight at us. We are all absolutely dumb-stuck. Floating there, you feel like you should be scared - terrified - and then the sheer awe of this creature just blots it out and well, all rational thought. With slow sweeping strokes of its wings, this manta ray literally flies around us. Curious at our strange intrusion, it circles. At a mere two feet over my head, this most alien of aircraft - with a wingspan longer than the height of two people - glides above me, with immense eyes, and mouth, and gills...
Since I was a child, watching the alien worlds of Jacques Cousteau, there has been one animal which I have burned to see, so unlike anything on this earth, and it was the manta. And meeting one, so close that it looked me straight in the eyes, that the bubbles of my breath played over its gills, and my hand could almost touch it?
Just majestic, quite mystical.
The diving was superb, drifting past batfish, Nemo-like clownfish, turtles, glowing jellyfish, moray eels, tuna and barracuda... For three days we swam in the warmest of seas, astounded at the sheer diversity and alien-ness if the sub-sea life. On the last day we crept up to a leopard shark, asleep on the sandy floor - shattered (obviously after a night of hard partying with his mates), he paid us not a whit of notice. But the last dive....
We sank into a strong current off Koh Bon, with sloping coral reefs to our left, and the great blue expanse of the Indian Ocean to our right. Drifting down to about a hundred feet below, our dive leader pointed excitedly into the darkened mist, and within it we saw this great white shape. Coalescing from the blue, an utterly alien ray glided towards us, before heading back out into deeper waters. I found out later it was a striped eagle ray - a good two metres across. Elated, we motioned to less fortunate divers what we had seen, and then...
From the ocean, this absolutely immense form, white with a mouth big enough to hold two divers, colossal white wings and a dark mottled back, glides towards the coral - and straight at us. We are all absolutely dumb-stuck. Floating there, you feel like you should be scared - terrified - and then the sheer awe of this creature just blots it out and well, all rational thought. With slow sweeping strokes of its wings, this manta ray literally flies around us. Curious at our strange intrusion, it circles. At a mere two feet over my head, this most alien of aircraft - with a wingspan longer than the height of two people - glides above me, with immense eyes, and mouth, and gills...
Since I was a child, watching the alien worlds of Jacques Cousteau, there has been one animal which I have burned to see, so unlike anything on this earth, and it was the manta. And meeting one, so close that it looked me straight in the eyes, that the bubbles of my breath played over its gills, and my hand could almost touch it?
Just majestic, quite mystical.