Going Tech

The quest for deep wreck diving is being realized in Thailand by the Trident Team of Jamie Macleod and Stuart Oehl, who run a dive center and also a live aboard with dedicated tech wreck diving charters.
Technical diving is new to Ko Tao and Thailand as a whole.
As Thailand’s waters, especially in the Gulf, aren’t considered to be overly deep by tech standards, this has not been a tech  hotbed like Bikini Atoll.  However, the depths are still considerably beyond  safe sport diving limits and new finds have put a spotlight on tech endeavors  here.
Having a huge area of relatively  shallow water to explore, it is gaining in popularity.
The gulf has been a major shipping route for hundreds of years and the wrecks  so far found and explored include wooden Chinese  pottery wrecks, WWII ships, planes, submarines and modern wrecks.
The USS Lagarto was the most publicized  find, and landed the MV Trident pair on US national news and the Undersea Detectives TV show.
The USS Lagarto is a Balao class fleet submarine sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy minelayer  Hatsutaka in May 1945 with all 86 hands lost.
She sits upright and fully intact in 235ft of water, and is a demanding dive.
Japanese records apparently state that 179 marus (merchant vessels) were lost in the Gulf of Thailand in WWII.
The coordinates of many of these virgin wrecks are known, and exploratory expeditions are run on a regular basis.
Although there’s no guarantee of a great new wreck every trip, the success rate is very high.