Stoli’s Koh Samui Diving Blog

Hey everyone.  For today’s guest blogger we will have Eric.  He is going to talk about boats and boat maintenance.  Before we get to Eric, I will talk a little bit about what is going on here in Thailand and at Discovery Divers.  It has really calmed down here politically and it is so normal here now that we don’t really here much of anything on the news anymore.  Now they have lifted any curfews in pretty much all areas except for Bangkok so a great time to find some deals on airfare and hotels and come to Koh Samui.  Remember, on the Gulf of Thailand side it is not rainy season like on the Phuket side.  The weather will be great here right up until November.  We may have a little system coming in on Thursday for a couple of days, but then that clears right out and the diving has been great.  Here is Eric:

Hi,  today I am going to talk about what might not be the most exciting topic, but a very important one.  Boats and boat maintenance.  Here at Discovery, we are one of only 2 companies on Koh Samui who run our own speedboats.  The rest of the companies either run on the bigger, slower tourboats, or they all share space on a speedboat from a speedboat operator.

When you have your own boats it is very important to do regular maintenance.  Especially when the diving spots are all 1 hour or more away from Koh Samui the last thing you want is to be on an unreliable boat.  When you choose a diving company you want to make sure that you can safely make it to your destination and back.  Outboard boat engines are very expensive and go through a lot with the seawater, waves and etc., so it is very important to keep them maintained.  While in the water and when we are using them daily we make sure that our captains, Aon, Aong and Nan, inspect and clean the engines daily.  Sometimes when you are diving you may see one of our captains in scuba gear under the boat at the dive site checking the underside of the boat.  Don’t worry, he will be back on the boat to take us all back.  If you hang out a little bit after your dives, you will see them doing this at the pier.  We also make sure to change the engine oil, filters, and gearbox oil more frequently than normal guidelines just to be extra careful.

Also, 2 times a year we take our boats out of the water in low season to do a full inspection of the whole boat and look for anything that may need to be touched up for fixed.  As we have 2 boats we can perform our bi-annual full maintenance and still keep one boat in the water to use for diving.  We just got done with our Discovery boat and have that back in the water now and have just taken our our Stoli boat as you can see in the picture.

  After our inspection there is not much to do on Stoli as it is only about 7 months old, but we be touching up the paint, especially on the bottom, touching up any outside paint and doing a full maintenance on the engines so everything will be in tip-top shape for high season which is just around the corner.  We know it is very important to our customers to make sure that you are on a safe and reliable boat and you can be assured that we take this very seriously.  You can see a little bit more info about our boats at our website http://www.discoverydivers.com.  Back now to Stoli to finish up.

I hope you learned a little about the boats.  If fact you can see me even doing my part and checking out the boat  if you have any questions about either of our boats please feel free to ask Eric, myself or our captains.  We would be happy to answer any questions.

Bark at ya later,

Stoli