After a couple of months without being able to dive, we were eager to get back in the water. We had planned to dive in Phuket but it turned out that it was the off-season and even though there were some boats going out, the dive shop told us it wouldn’t be very good so we skipped it. Thankfully, we didn’t have the same problem diving around the Phi Phi Islands.
We only had time for two morning dives and ended up going to Ko Bida Nok and the Viking Cave artificial reef. The artificial reef is relatively new and was built by placing 1,000-kilogram concrete blocks on top of each other on the sandy seafloor at around eighteen meters. There are around one hundred of the blocks and it took three months to complete. It must have been a sight to see them putting it all together. The marine life seems to be taking to the blocks but it has a long way to go. I applaud them for their efforts but prefer natural reefs over artificial ones, especially when this artificial reef is so new and there’s nothing else to see around it.
