Thursday October 7th, 2004
It rained all night and was still raining in the morning, nixing plans for climbing. So I booked a day-trip snorkeling at the last minute. After rushing back to my bungalow to get ready and barely getting back on time, the concierge told me it had been canceled due to the rain. So I had a slow breakfast, and then hired a long-tail boat to take me out snorkeling in the rain for a couple hours.
We went straight out to the islands visible in the distance from Railay and Ton Sai, and I snorkeled at 3 different islands: Poda, Chicken? and one other. The driver would anchor somewhere and I’d drop in off the boat and snorkel around awhile, then come back and we’d be off to the next spot. The water was nice and warm, except one spot where it was cooler on the surface, but still warm deeper than 5 feet or so. So I spent a lot of time down in the warm water. It felt great, maybe 85 degrees F or so. The snorkeling was good, lots of fish, coral, anemones, etc. Tons of life. The visibility was probably only 20 feet though, and the driver said that was due to the rain and wind stirring things up. Anyway I enjoyed it. I wished I’d had an underwater camera.
Jessie and I had made plans to meet in the morning, but we had no contingency plans for rain, and no way to contact each other, so I ended up not meeting him again. The rain quit for a couple hours mid-afternoon, so I went exploring some of the rock walls, and did a little bouldering at one. Then the rain picked up again and hung out the rest of the day.