Water sports & diving in Koh Samui

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Diving
The Gulf of Thailand is a great place to try diving, get certified or sample some of its great reefs on half or one day dive trips. If you have never dived before there are many options available. Discover Scuba Diving gets you straight in the water with an instructor and can take as little as half a day. If you enjoy this and want to learn, you can choose to gain full certification by taking the Open Water Diver course.

The operator will offer you a choice of options for completing the course - different locations, boats and even islands. The course takes only four days and will give you an international PADI diving license with which you can go diving all over the world. For the certified diver, you will find the operators on Samui offering a choice between trips to the National Marine Park, Sail Rock and Koh Tao.


These are day trips with travel times between one and three hours by boat. The National Marine Park is a beautiful archipelago, with the best diving and clearest waters offered by the islands to the far north called Koh Wao and Hin Nippon Yai and Lek. Further north, Sail Rock is the best-known site in the Gulf, offering a wall dive on the rock, while Koh Tao offers a choice of over 20 dive sites for all experience levels.


Sailing
Thanks largely to the success of the third annual Samui Regatta, sailing in Samui is becoming increasingly popular. The island has excellent weather conditions for sailing - a good all-year-round breeze that is a solid northeasterly between December and April, and a more challenging strong westerly with the occasional violent gust between May and November. Craft available for a day on the ocean waves include yachts, catamarans and more modest windsurf boards.


Kayaking
You can glide across the water’s surface near Samui’s shores or around the cave-riddled islands of Ang Thong National Marine Park. Sea kayaks are very stable and easy to use. A number of hotels in Chaweng rent kayaks, and several kayaking companies can arrange a full day tour complete with guides and kayaks in the marine park.


KOH YIPPON
Located in the very north of the Angthong Marine National Park Koh Yippon, is a picturesque rocky island covered in tropical trees. Once you peer under water, you will find plenty of beautiful hard and soft coral, sea anemones and stunning purple barrel sponges - easy to spot even in shallow waters, so this location is an excellent place to combine snorkeling and scuba diving.



While the snorkeler is exploring the exciting small caves and crevices in shallow water, the diver can enjoy big schools of fusiliers, come across a couple of big snappers or have a look under the rocks and corals to find blue spotted stingrays.


There are also big schools of small yellow tailed barracudas and lots of blue ringed angelfish. As the maximum depth here is about 18m, Koh Yippon is the perfect dive site for inexperienced divers or beginners.


One of the biggest advantages of this dive site is its shelter during the northeast monsoon season, so even if the sea might be a bit rough, Koh Yippon still offers calm areas to enjoy an unforgettable day’s diving and snorkeling.

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