In the footsteps of Jacques Cousteau

In my last post I suggested I thought these 3 days in Semporna would be good. That has turned out to be a severe understatement! I can't believe I have to move on now...

The diving here makes everywhere else I've dived seem like a waste of time. Well, the diving at Pulau Sipada does at least. On my first day here I wasn't booked to go out to Sipadan so I joined the trip to nearby Sibuan Island for 3 dives. The diving on the first 2 dives from the shore wasn't spectacular, but the island itself was gorgeous. Unfortunately the island is not part of the marine reserve so dynamite fishing is still prevalent and hearing a massive BOOM nearby whilst diving is quite disconcerting. For our third dive we headed a bit further offshore and I got my first taste of what the Celebs sea has to offer. There were turtles all over the place and the colours of the coral and sheer volume of fish were amazing.

Some kids playing on the beach at Sibuan Island. I'm sorry about the low resolution of the pictures in this post. The internet is very slow so I've had to resize them all.

A fisherman's house on one of the islands around Semporna.

Finding starfish while wandering around Sibuan during a surface interval.

Sunday saw me on the first of my two trips out to Sipadan Island. "Discovered" by Jacques Cousteau, Pulau Sipadan is an oceanic island that rises straight up from the seabed in the middle of the Celebs sea. If you were to walk five metres off the beach on the north end you would drop 670 metres straight down. And this makes for amazing diving.

The first dive I did was at one of the 2 most famous sites, South Point. Dropping off the shallow reef into deep water saw me land straight in a wonderland. Brightly coloured fish were just everywhere, some turtles glided by, some white-tip reef sharks cruised below, and a fantastic leopard shark passed within 5 yards of me. Wow! Swimming along the wall revealed many more turtles and beautiful fishes, and then at the southern most point numerous sharks were gathered, just resting on the reef or cruising the drop-off. Coming back up onto the reef and the world changes completely again. The brightest corals and fishes I've ever seen were everywhere, making it impossible to know where to look, and yet more turtles were resting in amongst it all, allowing me to swim right up to them. They are just so beautiful.

After that dive at South Point I firmly believed no dive could ever match it, but Barracuda Point (Sipadan's most famous site, and often voted the best in the world) was next up. Again the dive was along the sheer wall with turtles and reef sharks everywhere, but this time, at the northernmost point, I saw the barracuda that make this dive so famous. There were thousands of them. They shoal together in a mass that at times blocks out the sun. Hanging onto the reef to fight the current we were able to just sit and watch this amazing shoal of fish idling in the current and then swirling together in a massive vortex. The fisherman in me was doing his nut! And in amongst the barracuda were also huge kingfish and grouper the size of my old VW citi golf. I've run out of superlatives to describe it all.

After those two dives the 3rd never really stood a chance. To think that a dive into the massive Turtle Tomb underwater cave, with its huge shoals of jackfish could ever be described as second rate would have been unimaginable 3 days ago!

It's off for yet another underwater adventure...

Coming up from Barracuda point off Pulau Sipadan.

I don't have an underwater camera (yet...), but you don't need one when the locals at Sipadan pop up to say hello.

Yesterday I got to go out and do it all again. Whilst the initial wonder of the previous day wasn't quite there, the experience was naturally awesome again. And this time my dive group was made up of more experienced divers, all with Advanced licenses, so we could dive deeper, seeing bigger sharks and turtles and a wider range of fish. I can't begin to describe the feeling of swimming along the wall with dark blue below to over 600m and turtles swimming above silhouetted against the sky. I spent most of my dive time swimming on my back just staring at them. And in every little hollow in the wall yet another turtle stares out from its resting place, gliding out within a whisker of you when disturbed.

Now that I've made a mess of trying to describe the wonders of this place I must now get on a flight tonight back to KL. From there I was planning to explore peninsular Malaysia before meeting my sister for 3 weeks in Bali in September, but the diving gurus here have given me so many ideas of places in Indonesia to explore instead. They range from Wakatobi off Sulawesi to a tiny island near East Timor called La Petit Kepa. But I think I'm going to head to Pulau Weh off the north end of Sumatra and then try to get to Lubuanbajo on Flores to explore the area around the Komodo islands. So if you're not sure where I am in the next few weeks its likely I don't know either...