The Freaks Come Out At Night
June 17th, 2004
The city of Bangkok offers many sights to the tourist: Shopping malls, the Royal Palace, the Emerald Buddha…the list goes on. However, the experienced traveler will tell you that your trip is incomplete unless you sample the flavors of action Bangkok has to offer after dark. When the sun sets, the real party begins. Gone are the trappings of everyday life, and out comes the weird, the ugly and the unseen attractions that dare to show themselves only in the shadows of night. The diving is no different.
The veil of night brings out tentacled freaks, hermaphrodites, scavengers, sex-crazed lunatics and hunters who mercilessly prey on helpless adolescents. Yes, I’m still talking about diving.
A coral reef has many cycles, one of them being the nocturnal activities that allow for a host of lesser-known phenomena to occur while the rest of the community snores away. Some people are terrified of the idea of plunging into the black depths of a dark sea. But as you’ll learn as you read on, these dives can bring the most intriguing adventures at no cost to your safety.
Inexperienced divers should always do their first few night dives with a reputable operator, but if you really enjoy diving at night there is a specialty certification from PADI that will leave you feeling comfortable diving at night with a buddy of equal skill. The Night Diver specialty consists of a classroom session and 3 open water night dives during which you’ll demonstrate your skills in preparation, communication and navigation. The course usually runs about $100-120 USD.
The training begins with a maxim: Plan your dive and dive your plan. Begin with some place familiar. A great way to enjoy a night dive is to do a sunset dive in the same location just prior to the night dive. This offers several benefits: You’ll be much more comfortable with your equipment and surroundings having just explored them in the fading sunlight, and it’s a great exemplar of how the activities and organisms on the reef transform with a change from the dayshift to the nightshift. Night dives should always be done with either a Divemaster familiar with the area or a buddy with night diving experience and skills.
Your basic equipment should consist of a primary dive light (torch), a backup light and some kind of personal signaling device such as a strobe or glowstick attached to your tank valve. Additional useful pieces of gear include a safety sausage, reference lights at the entry/egress point (if shore diving), underwater markers and a whistle or other audible signaling device.
The dive time should be predetermined and the depth of a night dive should not exceed 14 meters. Divers head into the current using navigation markers (a cheap way to make one is using a common plastic bag and a piece of string. Just tie the string to a piece of coral at a known depth and use your octopus to inflate the bag, making a highly visible marker just below the egress point). If you don’t have any markers don’t despair. Divemasters and instructors seem to be masters of the sea, knowing just where to make a turn or ascent. In reality they’re just as human as the rest of us, commonly using natural navigation markers such as setting a distinctive shell on top of an unusually symmetrical table coral for example. The other divers will just be left thinking how brilliant you are when you seem to magically know precisely where to turn.
The pace of travel while night diving should be a consistent veritable creep. Many of us are not used to spotting the critters that come out at night and will end up plowing straight past the most interesting of them if the pace is not adequately slow. Also, your kick cycles, air consumption and dive time are all components of underwater navigation, so inconsistent spurts and expenditures of energy only lead to distortions of reference when using these measures.
You will be handsomely rewarded for meliorating the aforementioned skills as you come upon a hunting octopus, lithely creeping about in the open, hunting and scheming for its next prey. Various kinds of crabs and shrimps are only active at night, scuttling around the sponges and urchins searching for food. Most fish are asleep, a strange thing to see as you can swim right up to them without triggering their instincts to flee. Some however are more active than ever, such as humphead parrotfish, who swarm about in large numbers and can reach 5 feet in length. All those coral polyps you saw on the sunset dive, that looked like hard little cylinders, spring to life with their vibrant tentacles outstretched feeding on various microscopic organisms. Colorful nudibranchs are on the prowl for mates and can be seen outstretched into the current on a midnight serenade. Photographers covet opportunities to shoot at night, for both the chances to spot rare subjects and the richness in color produced from lighting conditions completely controlled by flash. You will even be surprised to find that the moonlight is quite strong once your eyes have adjusted, and covering your torch yields magnificent displays of bioluminescence (light refracted or produced by microorganisms in sea water). A night out on the reef can prove to be the most exciting type of dive a person can do, and many professional divers strongly attest that this is their favorite type of dive.
Dive buddies heading out at twilight on the zodiac for a night dive