New Frogfish discovered by Manta Queen 3 at the Richelieu Rock... it is not all about the fantastic Manta Shows ;-)

Manta Queen 3 Trip Number 212

Day 1 of the trip we woke up to a beautiful sunrise over the Similan Islands and a nice, relaxing check dive at Anita's reef. Next up Deep six and Elephant head rock with many cool swim-throughs. We also saw some whitetip reef sharks, big tunas and giant travallies in the blue!

On day 2 of the trip we dived the North point - pipefish and pygmy pipehorse heaven. That was it for the Similan Islands and we sailed north to the beautiful island of Koh Bon. In a few minutes after we jump in the water we saw the first manta ray. Few more minutes and we’ve got another three, so we had absolutely amazing manta show dive. Also some of our dive groups saw a zebra shark resting at the north ridge and blacktip reef shark cruising around. We spent nearly the whole next dive with the mantas circling us. Final sunset dive and we headed further north to Koh Tachai.

We stayed at Koh Tachai for the night and did our first and second dives of day 3 on the Dome. This time we were lucky enough to see mantas again also big schools of barracudas and giant trevallies! Then we left Tachai behind us and headed north toward Richelieu Rock in the Surin national marine park. The Rock was beautiful as always and we did 2 dives there with some unusual “red monsters” (cold currents coming from the ocean depth bringing a lot of food for fish and special mood for divers) We found a new Frog Fish, different nudibranches, peacock mantis shrimps, moray eels and much much more! We watched an amazing sunset as we ate our dinner and drove back towards Koh Bon.

4th and final day of the trip! Back at Koh Bon Island. We started with an early morning dive at the Koh Bon North Ridge. No manta rays this time but instead we’ve got a huge fantail marble ray also some octopuses and moray eels. Second dive we jumped at the West Ridge and got a first manta ray straight away, then a fantastic dancing manta show started! Besides that two big napoleon wrasses were coming by very close and looking into divers eyes, few octopus fighting each other for the right to make more octopus and schools of emperors together with bluefin trevallies hunting for glassfish.

Last dive at Boonsung Wreck - amazing variety of fishes as always, small and big honeycomb moray eels and of course lots of nudibranches - a great dive to finish a great trip!