Leaving at 07.15 a.m., eight hours and fifteen minutes took us from the Butangs to Koh Rok Nok for a mid-afternoon arrival enabling us to find good anchoring in reasonable light. It’s always best to have the sun directly overhead when anchoring at unknown islands in order to spot bommies – isolated coral heads - but arriving before 4 o’clock is okayish with Polaroids at the ready. It was a wonderful sail in force 4 – 5 winds all the way but long and tiring as there are always fishing boats and many, many fishing floats so constant vigilance looking out is essential; picking up a fishing float on the propeller would be very serious business. Arrival – searching round for the best anchoring place when a large motor cruiser untied his ropes from a mooring buoy, perfect and just in time for tea with Chris’s favourite digestive biscuits brought half way around the world by Ben at Christmas. Koh Rok Nok is part of the Tarutao national marine park and so has safe buoys for visiting boats so as to keep the corals free from potential damage by careless anchoring. There is also a warden and on this island permanent tents that can be rented for a very reasonable price as well as small bar/restaurant.

Later we went ashore and soon met up with Tom from Switzerland. He was spending a couple nights in one of the tents as a mini-break from the resort where he was staying on Koh Lanta; we swapped travellers’ tales as he spends most of his holidays in Asia and particularly loves India which we know nothing of. After a couple of light Thai Singha beers a group of local guys asked if we would like barbequed seafood so we all chose some squid and king prawns. Thailand specialises in farmed prawns but these were wild caught that day and some of them were the size of small lobsters, we have never seen anything like it and certainly not for sale anywhere. This was a wonderful supper, the squid was moist and very tender and the prawns delicious with sweet chilli sauce.

Snorkelling next morning we decided to dinghy out then let the dinghy drift along the reef following it in the water so we could cover a long distance without having to swim back and it worked really well. The water was still not really clear after the rough weather but we saw plenty of fish and some good healthy corals.

These pictures were taken with a cheap little Practika underwater camera that Chris bought as backup, the more expensive Fuji that I had last year for my birthday took a couple of pics then packed up. Upon inspection the card and battery compartment had water inside. Having looked on the net for other users comments this seems to be a fairly common tale. I have managed to dry it out and remove salt crystals in the compartment using a fine artists brush but I don’t trust it underwater now and wonder how long it will last. Buyers beware!