Dan's Adventure

Twentyish years ago, Jacques Cousteau, described Sipadan as an untouched piece of art. Since then it has played home to several resorts, been the subject of a territorial dispute between Malaysia and Indonesia, and the location of a kidnapping of tourists by a Fillipino terrorist group. Now though, Sipadan is a protected marine reserve, an attempt by the Malaysian government to retain its reputation as a world class dive location.

Sipadan is the only oceanic island in Malaysia. The remains of an old volcano, it rises 600m from the seabed, offering stunning wall dives all around. Located in the Celebes Sea off of Borneo, Sabah Parks issues just 120 permits every day to divers and snorkellers to enjoy one of the most marine diverse locations in the world.

Permits to dive at Sipadan are issued to dive centres located in Kapalai, Mabul and Semporna, with most receiving around 11 each day. Each dive centre needs to apply for permits on a daily basis with the identity of the divers, so it pays to book in advance, as most dive centres will guarantee a day at Sipadan for every 3 booked.

Sipidan is famous for its hawksbill and green turtle population. There is actually a turtle hatchery on the island where turtle eggs are recovered from the beach when they are layed and protected until the hatch, before being released back into the sea. This helps maintain the turtle population by protecting the eggs from predators. On one visit to Sipadan, we visited the turtle hatchery during a surface interval and saw turtles that had hatched that morning. They were tiny!

Before every dive at Sipadan, our dive guides would guarantee that we would see three things:

1. Your buddy
2. Bubbles
3. Turtles

In one dive at Sipadan I saw more turtles and more white tip reef sharks than I had seen in all of my previous dives combined.

Other common sightings at Sipadan included a herd of bumphead parrot fish that were searched for every morning. The bumpheads are pretty big and their denture like teeth make them look comical. They swim along in the shallows chomping on coral and shitting out sand. When you get close you can hear they coral being crunched. Schools of barracuda swirling above us, or balls of jacks, were spotted on most days too.

After a while I did get fed up writing sharks, turtles, barracuda in my logbook, so it was the unexpected things that kept it exciting. Devil rays, hammerhead sharks, eagle rays and octopus were spotted on a number of occasions. I will never forget when we spotted the hammerheads for the first time. Swimming along at a depth of 15 metres, the dive guide spotted them and started rattling her tank to get our attention and banging her hands at the side of her head to signal that she had spotted a hammerhead. Soon after, I had descended to 25 metres constantly checking my depth and trying to focus my camera all in the effort of getting just one photo. The hammerheads were still at least 10 metres below us and moved far too quickly for me to get close enough for a good photo.

Whilst Sipadan is famous for the big stuff, another world of diving is nearby. Mabul and Kapalai are renound for macro diving. Diving in only a few metres of visibility searching for small and unusual critters is a very different experience to the 20 metres of visibility, strong currents and huge wall dives of sipadan. Finding ornate ghost pipe fish hiding in the coral, brightly coloured frogfish sitting on rocks, and jawfish lying in the sand, it was a lot of fun seeking out the small things.

Mabul and Kapalai offer a number of upmarket resorts, in the form of floating villages, and Mabul also offers some budget accommodation. I opted to stay at the most unusual offering, a converted oil rig called seaventures. The seaventures rig has been converted into a hotel and positioned about 1km off of Mabul. I was told that the original owner had applied for permission to build a resort on Mabul but was refused, so instead dragged the oil rig in front of all the resorts to piss them off. The accommodation on seaventures is pretty basic, but when all you are doing is eating, sleeping and diving, you don’t need much more than a bed! The package they offer includes 3 boat dives a day to Mabul, Kapalai and Sipadan, plus unlimited diving on the house reef located below the rig.

The seaventures house reef is the best thing about staying on the rig. A lift takes you from the dive platform down into the water so that you can float off of it and start your descent. The seaventures reef was my favourite dive in the Mabul area. Its an artificial reef which is teeming with life. From electric blue ribbon eels to bright orange frogfish and a multitude of nudibranchs, there was always something interesting to take photos of. The only problem is that every evening the current really picks up, and since you need to get back to the lift to end your dive, it is very easy to get swept off it, as happenedto myself and two others during a night dive – fortunately I had a DSMB with me which attracted the attention of another company’s dive boat which took us back to the rig.

From chasing after hammerhead sharks and drifting along in the current at Sipadan to hovering in a couple of metres of water at Mabul trying to photograph sea horses, the diving off Borneo is incredibly diverse and offers something for everyone. I had a fantastic time diving with seaventures and would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone thinking about diving Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai.

For more photos, please visit my Borneo gallery.