Treasure Island St Martin’s

It all started with a dream of discovering the underwater world.

Back in 2002, met Mr. Quazi Hamidul Haque, a veteran scuba diver living in Dhaka. That time I was dying to do an underwater expedition in The Bay of Bengal. I thought St. Martins Island could be an alternative way to start with. We needed a lot of preparation as we were inexperienced in diving till that point of time.

On the verge of our expedition, we went through some diving trip logs and “The Sea Hunters” TV serial and with that at least we got to know that feeling the depth of the water was not as easy as to swim offshore. Few of us formed a group and started training ourselves at the Dhaka University swimming pool to face the harsh situation of the underwater. All the people other than us were trying to cope on how to breathe while swimming but we were trying to add an extra feature to it and learn to breathe underwater. It seemed easy to move or swim under water but practically movement for an inch requires more strength and energy. Most important part is there is no other alternative than pushing your laugh capacity. More you can hold, more you can move. When it’s a question of quick maneuver, someone have to know how, otherwise precise times will fly before hitting the target.

Finally on September 2004, a dozen of adventure lovers reached the white sand following a six-month training. We had tents, cooking stuffs, dive tanks, fins, snorkels, BC (buoyancy compensator), raft boat and many more with us. We logged in to Oceanic Scuba Diving’s hut, a company operated by one of our friends who had started providing commercial diving for beach goers in limited scale. We called it our “Base Camp”.

We hired a boat for roaming around the shore for selecting a perfect location and established another camp site at the south most tip of Bangladesh, “CheraDeep”. Anyone would love to be there as it is the best part of the entire Saint Martin’s Island. It’s calm, clean and hence its shore line is much cleaner than anywhere in Bangladesh. Tourists can easily see the seabed from the boat—shades of green, dark red, brown and other rioting colors.

We started rowing our raft in the morning, marked the spot with a dive flag and took a reconnaissance dive. It was a wonderful world down there! It was almost like a treasure island! It was sunny day which was and added advantage as fishes were looking like glittering gems and colonies of corals were looking like blooming buds! We had seen many brain corals in nonbearing routes. These corals are called “ Sea Flowers” and are found in almost all the oceans with warm water. In a favorable condition, they live for at least 200 years. These corals get their name from the grooves and channels on their surfaces that look like the folds of the human brain. Another type of coral that caught our attention looked more like hives. These are commonly known as ‘ Honey Comb’ corals or ‘Tabulate’ coral. They almost always form colonies of individual hexagonal cells known as corallites defined by a skeleton of calcite, similar in appearance to a honeycomb. Adjacent cells are joined by small pores. Their distinguished feature is their well-developed horizontal internal partitions within each cell, but reduced or absent vertical internal partitions.

There were many fishes with bright colors and beautiful shapes in different lagoons of north eastern part of St. Martin’s Island. It was easy to get very close to them.

We saw many bead corals in the shallow water. The reason was anchorage system of local boats. And the habit of collection corals of tourist is another danger that has been destroying the underwater beauty.