T13 Underwater Museum

T13 Underwater Museum

The T13 wreck was sunk in 2014 as a diving attraction.  However during the next 2 monsoons, the force of the weather and waves moved the boat 2 miles up the coast. When it was eventually relocated, the Department for Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR) decided to build an underwater museum around it.

During it’s underwater travels, the wreck broke up significantly, and buried itself in the sand.  The DMCR sank hundreds of concrete cubes surrounding the wreck to protect it from further damage, and they sank 16 trucks around it too.

Gary (owner of Go2Similan) was one of the team that planted corals on the concrete cubes to start the process of bringing life to the site.  Now we see masses of corals of many different types all over the cubes, as well as on the trucks.

Over the years the site has expanded, with DMCR putting lots of ‘cones’ – fish habitats – outside the original cubes structure, and one of the biker groups put an old Harley Davidson motorbike down as well.

We now see lots of marine life on the site – nudibranches, porcupine pufferfish, honeycomb moray eels, 2 x Jenkins Whiprays that live under the trucks, batfish and hundreds of juvenile barracuda.

The drivers seats of several of the trucks are now cleaning stations with pufferfish and others taking turns to look like they are driving the trucks, while getting cleaned.