2 days later
It was a soggy day in the Gulf of Thailand. We left the harbor at 9:00 in the morning and puttered for 2 hours south to a famous area dive site called Sail Rock. Sail Rock juts from the water and rises 25 meters into the air giving the circling seabirds a target to shoot for. They have very good aim because sail rock gleams white in the sun from the birds reflective left-overs. Below the water lies a 30 meter wall that makes a cozy home for the clams, rays, eels and other fishes. A diver can swim underneath an arch and ascend inside the chimney of the rock to see enormous groupers and snappers. It was a fun dive, but the famous site is very crowded so the Eyal, Charlotte, Tal and I jumped back on the boat where Tim was calibrating the side sonar dragger. We were looking for something new.

Tim is the only person in the area to have the sonar capability to map the Gulf and I was lucky to be along for the ride. The salty veteran technical diver had nearly 20 years of experience under his weight belt and you could tell that his vision for what lie below us came from years of seasoning. The GPS plotters ticked away as we rolled over 2 targets that had been snagging the local fishermen's nets for some time. We were also looking for a speed boat that recently went down south of the island. The sonar had a horizon of 300 meters on each side of the boat and we also had a vertical sonar unit that covered the blind spot beneath the boat.

We all anxiously awaited a blip, or bulge in the sonar readings as we ran lanes over the areas in question. If we got the word from Tim, we would all don our gear and fly over the rails to investigate what our instruments were divining from the deep. We waited and watched as the ship maneuvered over the targets. The flat line of the smooth bottom was like the morbid line of an electrocardiogram in an operating room. Nothing was happening, we were getting bored, and the clouds were darkly mounting on the horizon. After 3 hours of searching, Tim made the call to the Captain that we would end the sonar mapping and head for Shark Island for another dive. Shark Island had no sharks of course, but it was a nice dive all in all.