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| Pinnacle Beach, Ko Phaluai |
While anchored in four meters of water in a bay on the north of a small Thai island (Ko Phaluai -- lat: 9.550345; long: 99.69351) the other night (28/29 Sept., 2014), I woke up around 1:00 AM
to find the boat rocking a little bit, so I went out to check the direction
of the wind. Well, there wasn’t any wind to speak of -- the boat was just moving
a little, perhaps due to refracted swell (although it worth noting that we had not noticed any swell the previous day and conditions had been calm, so perhaps the movement was due to other reasons). But when I stuck my head out the hatch, I saw long
lines of phosphorescence pulsing into the bay. This was definitely something we
all had to see, so I woke up Michelle and the kids and we were soon on the foredeck
watching a most amazing and mysterious light show.
The pulsing lines or
waves were hundreds of meters long (as far as we could see), widely spaced, and maybe 8 meters wide, moving rapidly at a rate of
about 3 pulses per second. These slightly curved waves of light were moderately
bright and "clean" -- that is, without disruptions or anomalies, all the same width, evenly spaced, all with the same uniform, undifferentiated, moderate level of phosphorescent glow. The entire effect was incredibly geometrical. Within the waves (and around them) we could also see
an abundance of more “conventional” phosphorescence -- intense isolated flashes
of green from individual organisms caused by agitation through wavelets and darting fish.
