After making a 10 day exploratory trip to Thailand I can say, I sure hope I get to go back.  Here is what I learned from the trip. 

1.     If you can break the flights into multi-day segments, do so.   What did I do:  I flew Dallas to Doha, Qatar (about a 15 hour segment) Doha to Phuket, Thailand, (6+ hours) with a multi-hour layover in Qatar.  Even though all the segments were on 777’s, flying 20+ hours is just a beating.   I hope next time I can break the trip up into somewhat more manageable segments.  Dallas to Hawaii, after a couple of days in Hawaii to …. (you get the point, hop skip and jump style flying). 
2. If you fly the trip all at once, get a day room when you land.  I did and I was very glad to be able to sleep 5 hours and then go find the sail boat I would live on for 10 days.  Oh and having a pool at the day room was good too since after all of that flying I needed a way to stretch out the muscles that had been cramped up in those airplane seats.  
3. Thai food is awesome.  Every meal I had was great.  Now many of the meals I had were on the catamaran, but the meals I had on shore were also great and ridiculously inexpensive.  Try finding a restaurant in the U.S. where you can get a main course and a drink for $6 U.S. at dinner.  Do be careful, the Thai’s like their food spicy so get the tourist version of the meal at least until you figure out how spicy you like it.   
4. After flying as long as you have to in order to get to Thailand, get a Thai massage.  Compared to  what you would pay in the U.S. they are very reasonable.  $400 baht or as of this writing about $12 U.S. 

   

   5.  If you are an underwater photographer, plan on shooting more macro than wide angle.  From Phuket where I got on the boat, until we had sailed down to Phi Phi island,  the water reminded me of the Platte river in Nebraska; too thick to drink to thin to plow.  We did not do any diving for the first couple of days of the trip because the water visibility was too poor.  Diving would have resembled the Helen Keller diving school, you see with your hands and not with your eyes.  That said there was plenty to see topside.   

   

   6. If all you shoot underwater is macro, you are going to miss some great wide angle shots.  If you think about it for a moment, you will probably realize that the abundance of particulate in the water is food to fish.  And, yes we did see some amazing schools of fish on quite a few of the dive sites.  So if all you shot was macro, you may have missed shooting the enormous fish aggregations.  

There were three divers on the other side of this school of fish.  I couldn’t see them, can you? Now I could swim through the school of fish to find them, but I think I’ll take a shot or two before I do so.  

7. The long tail boats (see the first picture above) are everywhere and you do need to be careful where you surface.  Near Phuket the long tails are powered by what looks like an old chevy engine. 

The engine is attached to about an 8 foot transmission with a propeller at the end.  That system allows the long tails to operate in very shallow water with a draft of about a foot. 

For divers long tails can be bad, because if you get hit by the prop you will look like a frog in a blender.  Not a pretty sight.  As we got further from Phukett the long tail boat engines were smaller so that towards the end of the trip they were running with what looked and sounded like lawn mower engines, but even those engines could deliver a lethal blow to an unsuspecting diver.   We surfaced as a group and made sure we had our smb’s deployed during the safety stop.  

8.  Be ready for current.  Cozumel Mexico has current, for the most it part goes one direction.  The Cozumel  port authority shuts down diving if the current gets too fast or the weather gets too bad.   The water around Thailand has current; its fast and it doesn’t necessarily go in one direction on any given dive.  There is no port authority monitoring it.  Early in the trip we anchored the boat, threw out the tag line and the pool was open.  One of the guests jumped in with a noodle and before he came up he had reached the end of a 50 foot tag line.   We moved the boat and got out of that current.   So watch the current it can be fast.  Dive with locals who know the local currents.  

Those are the big points I learned from the trip.  More on the dive sites later…