One of the best investments I made as far as camera gear goes has been the Olympus Sytlus 790sw. While the camera only has  a depth of about three meters deep, it is more than sufficient to get decent pics of a variety of tropical fish in the waters of Thailand.

Note:  I am way to chicken to dare try to seal my DSLR properly to take even better underwater pics . Since I am rather clumsy, and probably more lax than I should be when checking things like seals and gaskets, I decided I would rather risk losing a camera worth about $250 USD than losing the amount of money I have invested in my DSLR.

While this probably isn’t my best photo from snorkeling at Koh Phi Phi, it was one of those times when I was able to just “hang around” while a bunch of tropical fish were swimming by.

I have to be quite honest in stating that taking pictures of fish is far more challenging than I thought. If the fish aren’t moving away from you rapidly, the tides will often change very quickly before you can even get off a shot. The only way I had any luck taking pictures of the fish was by brute force, which meant that I literally snapped over a thousand pictures to get to the 400 or so snorkeling pictures I have on my Flickr account.

A couple of alternatives to snorkeling in Koh Phi Phi would include Koh Surin and Koh Similan. These islands are only open from November to April,  about two hours away by boat from Phuket, and you will most certainly have smaller crowds present than you will find at Koh Phi Phi (you can even choose to camp there…but you have to book camps/bungalows well in advance).

This is probably one of the few times I will publish a higher resolution picture on the web, largely because it makes seeing the sea snake easier. While I personally wasn’t afraid of the snake, because I know they would have to bite you somewhere fairly “soft” to inflict lethal damage, the guide started to freak  when this snake got a little “too close for comfort”. I basically took this snap with my Olympus underwater cam, then was whisked away a few seconds later.

Update: I found out this is known as a Banded Sea Krait.