Racha Yai Bay 1

Bay 1 sits on the east side of Racha Yai Island. The boat drops you inside the bay off a white sandy beach, where the water is calm and the current minimal, and the whole dive runs between 5 m and 25 m. New divers can stay in the bay at 5 m to 10 m; everyone else descends on the shallow end and works out towards the wrecks. Scubago lists three of them, Local Dive Thailand counts five small wrecks plus a field of concrete cubes placed after the 2010 bleaching, and their individual depths are not published, so let the guide set the order in which you visit them.

The wrecks and cubes are where the fish gather. Longfin batfish hold inside the structures, giant morays laze in full view, and the hiding places turn up frogfish, stonefish, snake eels and nudibranchs for anyone who looks closely. On the sand patches away from the structures there are garden eels, Kuhl's stingrays and a large school of barracuda, and a couple of motorbikes have been sunk for divers to pose with. With the shallow end at 5 m there is plenty of bottom time to finish on the reef in the shallows and do the safety stop over it before surfacing back at the boat.