Here at Off The Chart Expeditions, customer care and safety is always our first concern.
We will continue the trip as normal. No changes in schedule, however we are following advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) and are implementing a few changes on board.
by Steph Venables, Marine Megafauna Foundation
One of the things I love most about it, is that there are still so many things that we don’t know, and so many questions to be answered…
I wanted to start by saying another massive thank you to everyone that joined us on our recent Banda Sea Expedition. These trips really are built around you, and I think Banda will be long talked about. Not only do we get to have a great time but we are doing some good along the way and who doesn’t want that.
I wanted to create something for you guys that would provide a way to remember the trip, but also the area. Banda struck me as such a special and unique location. Definitely somewhere I’m not in a hurry to forget. Read more
In between two of the world’s greatest dive destinations (Raja Ampat & Komodo) lies the Banda Sea. Within this vast sea lie the Banda Islands. And around these islands is a world of marine life, still relatively unknown to the worldwide diving community. Read more
At the end of the 2015/16 season, the Similan Islands national park announced that Koh Tachai was to be closed. We wrote about the details in a blog we named ‘Who Killed Koh Tachai?‘. This title was meant to be tongue in cheek, we didn’t expect it to become literally true. So where did all of these dead fish suddenly come from? Read more
Our new Similan Dive Site Guide features full colour maps and key facts about the dive sites you will likely visit on your Similan liveaboard trip. Read more
The photo above was taken in 2011. Our Similan liveaboard was moored up a few hundred metres from Koh Tachai beach. A tornado of barracuda were clearly visible from the boat so we just jumped in. That was 2011. By 2016 this area became a speedboat highway transporting over a thousand people a day. The recent closure of Koh Tachai in Thailand has resulted in an unexpected amount of international news coverage with speculation about what went wrong. Assumptions were made not only about who caused the damage, but more broadly about what the damage actually was. So who really killed Koh Tachai? Read more
