Phuket dives: King Cruiser

King Cruiser is a popular day trip dive site from Phuket, and one of my favourite sites in the area. It was a steel, twin-hulled car and passenger ferry built in Japan in the 1960's. It was operating as a passenger ferry from Phuket to Koh Phi Phi, there are no cars on Koh Phi Phi so no cars on the wreck either! This is how it happened: it was May 4th 1997 and a beautiful day - the sea was flat, the sky was blue and there was no wind, but the captain managed to hit one of the few submerged rocks between Phuket and Phi Phi, which is another of our dive sites, Anemone Reef. The ferry was badly damaged and travelled another kilometre before sinking 2 1/2hours later. There were 561 people on board, but everyone was rescued due to the fast emergency call, there were a few injuries but no-one died. The wreck now sits upright in 31metres of water. There are 3 theories as to what happened. The first was that it was sunk for insurance money - the policy was almost up on the ferry. The second was that the captain was drunk and his daughter was steering the boat. The third theory is that the dive shops in Phuket paid the captain to sink it so we could have a nice wreck dive!! Whatever the real reason, it's given us a fantastic dive. The wreck is 85m by 35m, is largely intact, and has attracted a huge amount of life. The wreck itself is covered in fish, sometimes so many that you can hardly see the wreck - that's the reason I love this dive! There are big schools of barracuda, snapper, fusiliers, and often rainbow runners coming in to hunt. There are some huge lionfish, schooling bannerfish and moorish idols, batfish and squid hanging around the mooring line...not to mention the smaller stuff - a huge variety of nudi's, different kinds of shrimp, ornate ghost pipefish, and LOTS of moray eels to name a few! There is also a resident turtle and if there are whale sharks in the area, they like to visit the wreck too :) All in all a fantastic dive...one of the 7 we do on our Phi Phi Overnight trip, contact us for booking!