Views & Nature

Jellyfish Hunt off the Trat Coast

A week ago a Thai guy posted a few photos that he had taken whilst on holiday on the Trat coast, midway between Trat town and the Cambodian border.  These pictures showed thousands of jellyfish – the sea was covered in them.  These included some bright blue ones that I had never seen off Koh Chang.  They often congregate on this stretch of coast in mid October – mid November but never before in such numbers.  Thee swarm stretched for a kilometre or so along the coast.  So he posted the photos for his Facebook friends to enjoy.  They went viral and within a couple of days they had been featured on Thai TV, in newspapers and he had sold the rights to them.

As we had never seen this type of thing before, myself & partner Mam decided it  was worth doing a trip down the coast on a jellyfish hunt.  A bit of phoning around and Mam had got hold of the phone number for a local with a small boat who had been taking Thai visitors out to see the swarm of jellyfish off Rachakarun beach during the previous couple of days.   All the accommodation in then area had now been booked and Thai groups were starting to descend on the place in pretty large numbers.

We got down there around lunchtime, which was good as by that time Sam, the boat guy, had called to say there was no point in going to Rachakarun beach as there were no jellyfish around there anymore.  Luckily, Sam was persuaded to do a bit of calling around to try to find where they might have drifted to and we ended up meeting him a couple of Km to the north at a small restaurant on a strip of sand called Ploy Daeng Beach.  There were no other boats out there. :-)  The jellyfish stay pretty close to the shore and tend to congregate most, in massive clumps, around undersea rocks.

If you want to go on a jellyfish hunt, boat hire is around 500 – 600 Baht at Rachakarun beach for a small boat for an hour or so bobbing around amongst the jellies.  Elsewhere it is 300 Baht.  The small boats can take 4-5 passengers.  There’s no guarantee of seeing jellyfish but they should be around the area until mid – late November.  The Googlemap below shows Ploy Daeng Beach, where we saw the jellyfish, Ratchakarun is a couple of kilometres south.

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