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The Setting

    The warm waters and colorful coral reefs of the Gulf of Thailand proffer a challenge and an attraction to underwater explorers. Curving in a sweeping arc from Trad in the Southeast to the mouth of the Chao Phya River in the north and thence down the Isthmus of Kra to Songkhla in the Southwest, the Gulf coastline is a thousand mile frontier that still awaits its pioneers.

    A myriad islets dot this fertile shore, and form a rare setting of nodding palms and spotless beaches under blue and sunny skies. Most minor archipelagoes are rimmed by coral reefs, whose crusty summits break the surface here and there at neap tide. Each reef abounds with its own community of active and curious life.

    Caves and crannies shelter grouper, parrotfish, colorful angel and butterfly fish and multitudes of tiny, sparkling demoiselles. Purple spotted stingrays, sluggish and un-aggressive huddle with companiable dogfish in their envelope-shaped retreats. Curious clownfish peer like guilty Judas rams from the gently waving anemone fronds, harmless to them (and to humans) but deadly to their small cousins. Now and then - but rarely - a trio of Moorish Idols swims slowly part, stately and inviolate.

    Beyond the reef, free-swimming schools of barracuda, caranx, queenfish glide over the sandy bottom. A four foot turtle like a flying sled on skids briefly into the scene, then darts off again.  Somewhere in the murk at the edge of the visible world a giant, ghostly shape cruises back and forth, barely perceived, unidentified. And of course, here as everywhere in the sea, the sleek form of a roving shark may suddenly add spice to the scene.

    Each tract of the bottom, too, like a well-ordered farm, has its landlord. Atop the chunks of coral, forests of tiny, gaily colored Christmas trees stand and wave, and pop suddenly out of sight at the touch of a finger: the tubeworms. Wedged in a crack is a great tridacna clam exposes its soft flesh, wheezing its life away oblivious to its destiny as an ashtray.  Brittle stars mince on little black feet while their bulbous, spiny relatives lumber in slow-motion search for prey. The sand between the corals is pocked with burrows, each tenanted by a bright-eyed, lazy fishling who tolls at his stoop while his Cinderella shrimp, housemate and housemaid, does the work. Small cones of sand spout like volcanoes to mark the holes too deep for digging where the molluses lie. And the warm and sunny sea embraces all.

[Vichien Jayewong, Thailand's premier spearfisherman, with a fine pompano.]