Three Trees

Briefing

The Three Trees is the northern part of the Similan dive site, Breakfast Bend which runs along the eastern side of Island Nine. We give it the name Three Trees after three iconic trees which stand out from the jungle on the island. Their bleached white trunks are easy to spot and they are essential to locate as this is our jump-in area.

After rolling into the water we use the trees as reference to locate the first part of this dive site, the three large boulders located in an easterly direction out over the sand. We will save the reef for later, swimming out over the sand we first come to a huge coral bommie, one of the largest in Similan Islands. This is a great place to look for nudibranchs, shrimps and crevice dwellers. Quite often in the lee of any water movement you will come across a Kuhl’s stingray or two in the sand so be careful not to disturb them as you make your way around the structure.

Swimming to the boulders we then pass by a couple of sea fans that are very close to our hearts. Back in 2018 we came across the fans at the start of the season, heavily damaged and pulled over lying flat in the sand. We contacted our friends at the Marine Park and the DMCR (Department of Marine Coastal Resources) who then joined us on our following trip to rescue them. You can read about our adventures rescuing the fan in our blog-post. We always stop to have a little look and check the health of them, until now we are proud to say, “still standing and going strong“.

We now get to the outermost part of the reef with the three huge boulders and the famous giant barrel sponge. Barrel sponges are apparently slow growing but no one seems to have mentioned this to our sponge. Each year it continues to grow and takes pride of place in between the rocks. The life in this area seems to revolve or situate itself around the sponge.

Around this time we will start to be nearing our 10 min NDL time or maybe a few divers are near 100 bar, so we can slowly make our way back over the sand and pick up the reef. We will need to watch out for any currents and possibly adjust our direction as we swim. The sandy bottom is teeming with gobies and other critters so be careful with your buoyancy and your fins. Quite often as we hit the edge of the reef we will come across big tuna or schools of barracuda.

For the rest of the dive we can drift along the shallow sloping coral reef. The reef bottoms out at around 15m depth so it’s perfect for the latter part of our dive. If you are keen to spot a turtle, head to the top of the reef which is around 10m depth and drift along. We frequently see hawksbill turtles here.