lord khram
Contributor
Thanks for all the replies everyone. I think for me if I was to travel all the way to Thailand again, I would want to see Pattaya but also get in some 'good' diving. So I would likely go to Pattaya and then fly down to say Phuket to dive out of there in order to get the Andaman Sea diving. In such a trip where I would dive in the Andaman Sea for sure, I am wondering if I should even bother to do one day of diving when I'm in Pattaya. What would you do in such a case?
In Pattaya, to me the best dives are Koh Rin North Rock, and the Khram wreck, due to them being quite far apart it is unlikely to get an operator to visit both on the same day. I know you said you were not interested in the wrecks, and would agree that as wrecks none in the area are particularly inspiring but the Khram does have lots life to see, more so than most of the so called scenic dive sites.
At Samae San, Shark fin rock is in my mind the best site, nice reef down to around 26m. To me the hard deep wreck is simply no longer worth diving, particularly as no one ever plans dives around the tides, and the wreck now being well broken up, so with the window of slack water being so short at this site, it is highly likely that you will find yourself in quite an extreme current which will be hard work and can make for unpleasant diving conditions.
---------- Post added May 8th, 2014 at 12:30 PM ----------
LK, I have no desire to get into a 20 page 'tit for tat' argument. I'm sure that regular visitors to this forum are well aware of your 'axe'. I agree with you that it would not be wise to plan a diving holiday to Pattaya (I think I said something similar in my original post) but I do think it is worth a day out if you find yourself in the area. I have around 300 Pattaya dives under my belt, some great, some OK and some not so good. No offence intended. I just wanted to offer a balanced opinion.
Thanks for the reply Russ. I note as you are offering a balanced opinion, and as you say my opinion is ''an axe to grind''! Just so we all know.
I congratulate you on your 300 Pattaya dives, but again to put a balance on our opinions I have done well in excess of 1000 dives in the area over a 15 year period, couple that with several thousand other dives at various locations around the world, including cave / mine diving, and advanced deco dives up to almost 100m, but generally don't feel the need to quote such statistics when answering a simple question on a forum. I would also note that as yet you still have not told us exactly what the axe is you say I am grinding??