1. Place that is thick of sand flies (noseeum).
2. Saw no whaleshark in supposedly known for & came there for.
3. Went diving with an unknow dive operator.
The last one is quite an experience that is not worth repeating. I have no choice to look for another dive operator. The old dive operator who was recommended by others & I had gone with, 2 years previously, had sold his business to this new dive operator, including the deposit that I already gave to the old dive operator. So, my group were stuck with this new dive operator.
We went in with 2 boats, the girl's boat (where all the woman divers with woman DM were in) and the boy's boat (where the man divers with man DM were in). There were not much of briefing, the DM just said, "there is an arch there that we'll go under", once everyone was ready, we all went down. He went down with speargun.
The arch was pretty deep, about 110'. It was pretty long of finning to get there. Then he saw something. He asked me to wait for a few seconds, went under a ledge and came back with a fish on the stake & asked me to hold his net bag so he could shove the fish into. Again, this was at 110' deep. I ran to a couple minutes deco at the end.
On the second day, the captain couldn't find the wreck where we were supposed to dive into. There were no GPS on the boat, just fish locator & radio (at least they had the radio). Both boats were spreaded out to find the infamous wreck. The boy's boat captain thought he located the wreck after 10 minutes of wondering on the sea and asked everyone to jump in. We went down to about 60' to the bottom & found no wreck, but rocks & sands, so we went back up. When we were back to the surface, I saw the girl's boat was about a size of cigaret lighter & their captain radioed the boy's boat captain that they located the real wreck. So, my speargunner DM had a bright idea, instead of us getting back up on the boat, asked our captain to throw a rope so the boat could "tow" us to the right spot about a mile away. I was at the end of the rope, unfortunately, so the weight of everyone hanging on the rope (5 of us) was enough to keep me from floating with snorkel. I was on the deepest end of the tow basically. I had to fin up to the surface to breathe, while holding on the rope at one hand and my camera on the other hand, while being towed. Finally after a couple of minutes struggling to breathe, one of my diving buddies, after observing my head popping in & out of the water, yelled to the DM to stop this nonsense. We all took our time to get back on the boat. We lost about 30 minutes of monkeying around with this circus on surface & wasting about half of the tank air. On the bright side, our short dive time in the wreck was fantastic with tons of fish and with 22 hours no fly time still remaining.
Unfortunately that was not the end of our diving adventure of the day. All of the monkeying around to find the wreck, was wasting our "just enough" fuel on the boats. On our way back to the resort (about an hour of boat ride), the girl's boat ran out of gas. So, our captain said, "no problema, we tow their boat". After about 15 minutes of towing the girl's boat, our boat ran out of gas. So, we were floating on the sea. Our captain called his shop to bring some fuel back to our boats.
In the meantime, a fancy fishing boat came by and rescued the girls & took them back to our resort, but just the girls, not the boys. We were not pretty enough to hangout with the fishermen. We waited another 90 minutes for the mobile gas station to come over.
When the mobile gas station arrived, it was a pretty interesting scene to see how they transfer the fuel from the plastic 200 gallon tank to the boat fuel tank. The captain did the good-old day method of syphoning the gasoline with a hose using his mouth.
In the end we, the boys were about 3 hour late getting back & were so hungry. I could easily devour a meal in a minute like my puppy dog by dinner time.