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It was a wet windy day.

We had woken up at 6 in the morning, ate the eternal fried eee*, served by our waitress who sported her usual heavily powdered 5 o’clock shadow, then, dragging the snorkeling equipment behind, we proceeded to the docks in Chalong, from where we were going to Coral Island for the day. The wet windy day.

(*as far as we could gather, Thai omits the pronunciation of some consonants in the final position and lengthens the previous vowel; we had the revelation that the question eee? was to ask if we wanted egg - boiled, scrambled or fried.)

Cursing the luck of having chosen that very day to see "the white sandy beach with crystal clear water", as the brochure advertised, we slumped into the back side of the boat, wondering why everybody was elbowing each other for a spot in the front. Not only was there nothing to see except for the leaden clouds, but we were also in a speed boat. Speed boats might be ubercool and sexy, and nothing compares to the sea breeze in the kisser while sitting at the bow or even behind the helm (coolness +9000), but that doesn't change the fact that if it's windy, there are waves, and if there are waves and the speed boat goes 60kmph, you're going to look like these unfortunate souls.

10 km and 15 minutes later, we descended, a little green in the face and 20 cm shorter from all the hurtling and violent crashes against the bench, on a floating plastic bridge, which meandered on the waves all the way to the beach, 30 liquid meters away.

With graceful wobbly movements, worthy of Chaplin on roller skates, the crowd shimmied from the boat to the shore... and promptly plopped themselves on the beach chairs, wrapped in all the clothes they had, for what else was there to do in that weather?

Coral Island (Koh He, near Phuket) got this name because of its proximity to several coral reefs - the beaches are full of white pieces of coral, and the sand is white; the bottom of the sea is also covered with coral twigs, which on the one hand gives it an eerie, ossified appearance, on the other hand ensures a cheerful population of thousands of colorful fish.

Unless, I say, unless it's a wet and windy day, when even the colorful fishy stays at home in his robe and slippers and waits for the sun to come out.

On Coral Island you can spend the night; there is a resort, with nice bungalows, clean beaches, exotic beach bars and swimming pool. But for the day tourists, like us, there is the commercial beach where about 2000 tourists are spilled over daily. It has a slightly seedy, open air canteen, and a moderately scruffy toilet. So do not delude yourself that it will be like in the pictures you saw on the internet. Even if it's sunny, you'll still have 200 tourists in sight.

But our purpose was a very precise one: sea walking, not Jesus-style, but on the actual seabed.

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What does this entail?

You are taken with a small boat about 30-40 m offshore and deposited on a slightly more solid boat, on deck.
You get some plastic sea shoes (no messing around with the sea urchins in Thailand, please).
Then, without any jazzy introductions or explanations about how and what is going to happen, you are invited to climb a ladder down into the water, and your protests are muffled when they put on your shoulders a helmet looking like an old diving suit from 1850, you feel a strong jet of air, someone in the water grabs you and pulls you down and you say to yourself, “that was it, goodbye, cruel world, now I will meet my doom in the shape of a local Kraken, or at least a giant prawn. Mmm, with garlic sauce.”
Actually, a couple of divers make a relay race with you as the baton, and take you 4-5 meters deep, where the under the sea "guide" is waiting, presses your shoulders vigorously to remind you to step on your heels, not to hop around like a cosmonaut, and guides you on a short route around a railing.

You can see what happens there in the video below.

Sea walking in Coral Island (Ko He), Phuket, Thailand / 2015. See it HD :)

The nicest part of this experience is that the helmet is not closed, it just rests wide open on your shoulders. You are basically in the water up to your neck, and the powerful air jet coming through a tube, from the boat above, produces enough pressure to keep the water level up to your chin. You can go in with your glasses on, with your make-up fresh, and you don't even need to know how to swim, since you're going from scuba diver to scuba diver like a parcel, to the bottom of the sea, then you just hold on to the railing (and you have the considerable weight of the helmet anyway).

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After about 15 minutes of feeding the sergeants major (that's the name of the striped fish, which are very biting and bitchy - but that's more along my experience, the others did not really complain), you're brought to the surface and left to bobble in peace for a while, until you return to gravity and normal air pressure.

All the fun of a day at Coral Island, with the hotel pickup, boat ride, sea walk and a lunch included, cost 2000 Baht (same price today), ie about 55 EUR. It's probably more pleasant to spend a night or two right on the island, to avoid the herds of tourists, at least in the evening. And if you happen to be there on a sunny day, snorkeling will be lots of fun. Although the sergeants are the most insistent and just as common as pigeons, there are plenty of other colorful fish. During the sea walk we were also shown a clown fish that lived nearby in an anemone, and about whom we speculated that was paid by the hour to smile and wave at the tourists) (at min. 03:10).

After sea walking, the weather started to finally look up, the wind calmed down a little, so we managed to snorkel in slightly clearer waters. Plus the inevitable selfie with the cohort of sergeants.