Racha Yai Diving Tours – Racha Yai Island (sometimes called Raya Island) is known for it clears water, healthy marine life and generally easy, year-round diving. Because of these typically gentle conditions, this island is prime choice for dive training and snorkeling and offers a suitable environment for divers of all experience levels. We do our open water training dives here. Racha is also a good place to do Advanced course navigation dives and refresher dives.
Most of the better dive sites are along the east coast, which is protected from the southwest monsoon. Dive sites primarily consist of sloping hard-coral reefs surrounded by white-sand bottoms. Marine life includes a variety of reef fish and invertebrates. It is also quite scenic above water, with several superb white-sand beaches bordered by groves of coconut trees.
All though the small tranquil bays on the east coats of Racha do have Thai names, they are normally referred to as bay 1, bay 2 and bay 3 and on a typical dive we start in one shallow bay, dive out over the reef and drift along the fringing reef until we reach the next bay where our boat will be waiting to collect us. The shallow bays have coral bommies in batches of sand and are good places to see lionfish, eels and small critters such as pipefish. There are some nice examples of brain and table corals here.
The fringing reefs are mainly staghorn coral, especially the aptly named Staghorn Reef. We see lots of turtles on the reef along with puffer fish, parrotfish, moray eels and octopus. The reef goes down to about 20 metres but if you swim out a little further in the sand you will see blue spotted stingrays, flounder and garden eels.
Racha Yai Diving Sites
Lucy’s Reef has more rocky boulder formations with sea fans and a few anemones clinging on. It is normal to see large schools of yellow tail barracuda here.
Home Run has a small wreck that is fun to dive around. Although Racha Yai generally has weak currents they can sometimes pick up here and bat divers away from the island for a “home run.”
On the north west coast of Racha Yai is Bungalow Bay named for the beach bungalows that once lined the beach, now replaced by a very nice resort. You can dive on both sides of this horseshoe shaped bay. We normally drop in on the outer edge of the bay and dive into shallower water. There is plenty to see here among the varied hard coral formations.
One of the more interesting Phuket dive sites is Siam Bay which has some underwater statues in it. Here you can dive with elephants among other things. It’s a great photo opportunity and always popular with our divers.
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