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Racha Noi Banana Bay South

Racha Noi Banana Bay South

Racha Noi Banana bay is An Easy Phuket Dive Site With Great Visibility

For many students Racha Noi Banana bay will be part of your first Phuket diving experience. The clear shallow bay is often devoid of current. Making it an ideal dive site for first timers and more experienced divers who haven’t got wet for a while. That’s not to say it’s a bad dive site, just a very safe one.

The dive will begin near the very beautiful coral gardens at around 4-5 meters. Many species of jewel like damselfish, butterfly fish and quite often a hawksbill turtle make a pretty start to the dive. A rubble patch will follow that although not very picturesque is a great place to look for cuttlefish, octopus and reef stonefish as well as the occasional eagle ray.

eagle ray at racha noi phuket

eagle ray at racha noi phuket

At 18m plus we find a lot of small reef bommies. The dive slows down a bit here as your guide looks in all of the nooks and crannies for moray eels, comets and various species of cleaner shrimp. The small bommies usually have small schools of yellow goatfish and snapper. They make a nice contrast to the clear blue water. Small patches of robust staghorn intercede the bommies – a rare sight around Phuket after the coral bleaching in 2010 but it’s great to see then coming back.

For some reason giant frogfish love Racha Noi. They’re not a common fish on any Phuket or Similan Island diving site so why we don’t know. Frogfish are masters of camouflage so we certainly can’t promise anything but we will try!

Don’t Ignore The Sand Patches At Racha Noi

On the sand patches at 20m we should be able to find you some kuhl’s stingray and if your lucky jenkins whiprays can make an appearance. Some unusual nudibranchs and juvenile cockatoo waspfish are always there but very very difficult to find so please excuse your guide if they get a little over excited when they find one of these minuscule critters.

clarkes clownfish at racha noi phuket

clarkes clownfish at racha noi phuket

The dive guide will usually end the dive back where you started from unless there is an unusually strong current. In which case you’ll drift gently along with it and get picked up outside the bay. As with all the dive sites at Racha Noi keep looking up. Giant manta rays glide along the dive sites on there way to the cleaning station at the south tip. You’ll have to be lucky but there’s definitely a chance…

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A happy dive team makes for happy guests. Sir Richard Branson is famed for saying that you "should train your staff so that they could leave, but treat them well enough so they don't" and that is the motto we work with here at Local Dive Thailand. We might be a large, tour leading scuba diving agency but we know the value of quality staff. Some of our dive team have been with us since we first started operating. Many have been diving in Phuke [...]

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Don't trust your diving to amateurs or freshly minted dive guides, dive with local experienced experts from Local Dive Thailand. Our Scuba Diving Phuket Tours will take you to see the rarest of the rare critters, you will be amazed by the macro life our guides can find, in the secret places only they know. To put it in perspective, if you were going to climb Mount Everest you would certainly hire a local sherpa to lead the way & keep you safe. Diving is similar because there is absolutely no substitute for local experience & local knowledge, Local Dive Thailand's guides are Phuket's Sherpa's of the Andaman Sea!

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Scuba Diving Phuket, Phi Phi & Thailand

When talking about Scuba Diving in Phuket, you should believe the hype, many seasons we have had Whale Sharks grace us on our regular and easy to reach dive sites and on a good day you can add Sea Horses, Sea Moths, Snake Eels, Frog Fish & Octopus to what you can see on any given dive and so much more. If we are heading to Phi Phi Island for the day, you can possibly see Hawksbill Sea Turtles and Black Tip Reef Sharks, also don't forget the King Cruiser, 84 meters of beautiful wreck and the most amazing reef nursery for fish and nudibranch. Local Dive Thailand day trip tours to these locations are not to be missed when you are scuba diving Phuket, get in touch with us and book an 'awesome' day of diving.

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