26-Mar-2016 -- A short weekend in Hua Hin also gave the opportunity to some confluence hunting. I knew there was one at sea which had not been visited yet, a bit southeast of the city. A look at Google Earth indicated that a small village called Kao Daeng (เขาแดง) up a small river had quite a number of boats and the distance to the confluence point was only 10.7 km.

Hua Hin is a tourist hub, and small rental cars were hard to find. I settled for a mid-sized one and headed south for about 65 km till I saw a great gate on the left welcoming visitors to Kao Dang and the National Park Sam Roi Yot. Another 10 km or so and I drove down to a beach were I spoke to a man who was scraping seashells off the bottom of his boat. He just told me that nobody could take me out as the tide was out.

Near the main temple of the village there was activity with small boats taking tourists up and down the river. These vessels were too small to go out to the open sea. Finally, I met Dom, a fisherman who had an 8 meter long boat which he said could make it. The hull of the vessel was a bit like the Viking ships I know from Norway, fairly wide and not going deep, a hull that takes you over the waves and not through them.

The weather was good, the waves not higher than a meter or so, and it took us about ninety minutes to the confluence point. The distance was not 10.7 km as I had measured on Google Earth, but around 16 km. The first hour the boat’s echo sounder showed a depth of about two meters, but at the actual confluence point it was 26 meters. On the way out we saw some threatening clouds in the east, but they fortunately did not drop any rain on us. The view towards the west was not very good, but in the haze we could see land.

There we also met some larger trawlers. Dom based himself on catching big shrimps. He had about ten nets, each 50 m x 2 m which took him about six hours to put out and pull back on board again. That would normally give him a catch of around 10 kg. We were not fishing or catching anything, but some terns were all the same optimistically circling the boat. The sun is strong out at sea, so a long sleeved shirt, a cap with a neck shade and sun glasses are recommended.

My sea-legs are not what they used to be, so when I stumbled and fell on deck, I saw Dom's worried face and heard his immediate question: "Can you swim?" So if you cannot, perhaps you can borrow a life west if you plan to do this trip

PS. Time on GPS is CET.