Underwater Paradise

We arrived in Malaysian Borneo via boat from the Indonesian island of Tarakan. We headed immediately for the small seaside town of Semporna. Ironically enough, Semporna is Bahasa Melayu for "perfect". This explains the ocean surrounding the town, but it is the antithesis of the town itself. Luckily, we weren't in Semporna for it's seashore. We had come to feast our eyes on its underwater treasures. The islands off Semporna's shores are reputed to hold some of the best diving spots in the world and the island of Sipadan tops the list. We were heading to this island to try to see the hammerhead sharks, dozens of turtles, large schools of barracuda and other large pelagics which are rumored to ply these waters. Other nearby islands are said to be teeming with strange bottom dwelling creatures of the types we found in Lembeh Strait. We were going to search for these creatures with the help of Scuba Junkies Dive Shop, which came recommended as cheap and good.

Our first day of diving was at the famed island of Sipadan. Sipadan stands out from the rest of the islands much like Sangglaki did in Kalimantan - Sipadan rises from the depths like a grand pillar and the currents whip about it from all directions. Because it is surrounded by an underwater wall and because of the swift currents, many large animals congregate near. Due to this phenomenon, MANY people visit Sipadan year round. Also because of it's spectacular underwater life the Malaysian government has made the waters around the island a reserve and restricts access to 120 people per day and believe me, it does fill up. The government also kicked the resorts off the island in the name of conservation/preservation - or so we thought until we saw the troops of military men housed in the old resorts while keeping an eye out for pirates, terrorists and others who might illegally enter Malaysian waters.

KC finally buckled in to paying for his scuba advanced course long after fulfilling all the requirements but without paying the ridiculous fee for the plastic card. Up until this point, I never realized just how utterly worthless the advanced certification is. I could be a NAUI snob and attribute this observation to the lack of proper instruction PADI offers. After all, I was certified with NAUI and as far as I remember the advanced course was more technical and helped give a better understanding of how to navigate underwater. But the course KC did was a joke! He needed to complete 5 different dives for the certification and so on our first dive in Sipadan, we suited up with four other divers and 1 instructor for the deep dive. The first doubt about our chosen dive outfit came when I jumped in to find that my buoyancy regulator wouldn't stay inflated. No biggie though, just hop out of the sea, change gear and off we go!

Dive 1: Hanging Gardens
We descended down to 32 meters. On the way down we passed all the colorful coral and fish so at depth we were faced with the brown wall on one side and very murky water on the other. Basically, the only thing down here are sharks, including the hammerheads IF you're lucky enough to see them. We weren't. The viz was so awful and it wasn't even the right season to go hammerhead sharking. So instead we watched a lot of nothing for about 15 minutes. At the end of our dive we did see some sharks as we found ourselves floating over a group of about 10 juvenile grey reef sharks. There were also a few turtles, but none in the numbers everyone assured us we would see. Turtles were so common in Derawan and around Sanngalaki that they were no longer as thrilling and not even worth mentioning on subsequent dives. Just assume we saw at least 5 turtles on each dive and leave it at that. (In all seriousness, I don't think I'd ever get tired of turtles, but when searching for other amazing creatures it's a bit tiresome when the guide keeps pointing out the obvious and ubiquitous reptiles).

Dive 2: Turtle Cave to Barracuda Point
The second inkling of doubt about Scuba Junkies came when before descent it was discovered that my emergency regulator (aka octopus) wasn't functioning properly. 2 for 2 on bad gear. During this dive we visited Turtle Cave, which is part of a large cave system under the island. It is so named because the carcasses of turtles who couldn't find there way out before their breathe ran out can be found deep inside. For the super adventurous (and idiotic?) it is said you can tour these caves if you carry along a few extra tanks and are willing to remove your equipment from time to time to squeeze through the small tunnels. We barely scratched the surface of the cave and only went as far as the light.

After leaving the cave we were kicking around with not much to see. Lora The Always Searching decided to turn 180 degrees to see if anything had started swimming behind the group. Sure enough, off in the distance was an enormous swirling school of barracuda. Since we were the last divers of the bunch and the others were speedily sailing through the water in the other direction, they missed the amazing barracuda mass. Ecstatic at the sight, we frantically tried to make noise underwater so the rest of the group could partake in the silvery fish, but it was to no avail. Soon the fish were barely visible in the distance in one direction and our group in the other so we were forced to abandon our efforts of fish gawking to join our blind guide once again. Later on the surface we told the others what they'd miss. Our guide's explanation for his lack of observation was because the great toothy beasts were usually found during a later section of the dive. Goes to show you that by becoming to familiar with a site one can become blind to the unexpected and thus miss out on some great sightings.

Sadly, we trudged on, but it didn't take long before we came across another large school of albeit, less intimidating fish: the trevallies. The flat shimmering fish were wonderful to watch as they circled around each other in almost complete unison. Among the mass was one or two giant trevally which were about 4 feet long and darker in color. We could have stayed among the fish but again, our swift mates had already grown tired of the school and had jetted off in search of other creatures instead of appreciating the ones they'd already found.

Dive 3: MidReef
This dive wasnt' anything to write home about except for the spotted eagle ray. We ended in the shallows over beautiful coral where some yellow finned jacks and some tuna were playing but our guide had had enough and called us to the surface before we could explore further.

Dive 4: Night Dive at Tong's Marker
Great night dive! Except for the claustrophobic feeling one gets when 6 people with flashlights are trying to squeeze around a creature the size of a baby's toenail, it was fabulous! Our dive guide was one of the owners of the dive shop and is an exceptional guide who has logged thousands of dives and has a knack for finding the smallest and most amazing underwater creatures. His eyes are phenomenal and he is the reason that this shop was recommended to us. We had hoped to get him as a guide for more dives but unfortunately this was the only one and the other dive masters that we dove with did not have the anywhere close to as good an eye as he had. We had came to Semporna not only wanting to see the big creatures of Sipidan but also the many small strange ones on other nearby islands and to get your money's worth for macro diving you often need an experienced guide with a great eye who has logged many dives in the area. Scuba Junkies has a program where many new dive masters are trained, which is all fine and good unless you are the unlucky one who gets one of these fresh dive masters in training who has only logged 3 dives in the site and knows it hardly any better than you do. But enough of the complaining and back to the great night dive with the great guide.

As soon as we jumped in we found a small bamboo cat shark which was an interesting looking fellow. We slowly descended a bit deeper along the slope and our guide began pointing out this and that for all of us to see. There were decorator crabs and spider crabs and tons of nudibranchs. We even saw a nudibranch that our guide had never seen before and one which he thought was a species that had not been described ever before. He said that he had already found a number of new species in the area and it certainly seemed like he knew his stuff. When he saw the new interesting creature he took tons of pictures and did a happy dance underwater. After an hour underwater and having seen many new animals we surfaced and headed back into town to warm up and rest our sleepy heads.

Dive 5: Black Coral Garden
We came to the dive shop in the morning and we were informed that we were no longer going to the island where they had told us the night before. We were not entirely happy about this since we had been briefed on this island and had decided that it would suit our interests for macro diving. But we could not do too much about their last minute change and decided to suit up and go dive anyways. We also got one of the dive master trainees as a guide and he was very thorough and good about explaining the dive beforehand (something you do not always get in SE Asia diving) but his knack in finding small things was not so great. We dropped down to about 25 meters and we saw a garden of black coral which actually is not black except for the trunk of it and it actually looks like a large white bush. After this we swam around and saw a number of nudibranchs, a crocodile fish and a few other things. The visibility was really poor here (only about 10 feet or so) and there was not anything else really notable about the dive other than the black coral.


Dive 6: Sibuan Island - Froggies Highway
Once we got up from the black coral dive, we were informed that we had to switch islands because the current was too strong here for the open water diver class that was on the same boat. So we decided to go to the same island that we were originally planning on heading to. Our next dive was supposed to be a place to possibly see some frogfish and luckily we did see a nice big green one that Lora found. We also saw a huge crocodile fish and got some great pics. This dive was better than the last and probably better than our next one but nothing spectacular.

Dive 7: Sibuan Island - Mandarin Point
Our last diver of the day and the last dive for this area we decided to look for some resident mandarin fish. We were told that we would see them in the beginning but when we did not see them in the first twenty minutes I thought that we were not going to get to see them at all. Mandarin fish are really shy and small but extremely colorful (almost like a flouresent blue green pattern on an orange background). Casey had seen one before but Lora had not so we were hoping to have an encounter and we were told that this place was pretty much a certainty. We were getting a bit anzy when we had not seen it, nor anything else interesting in this shallow dive through some fields of broken coral. Luckily at the end of the dive we finally did find quite a few in a patch of sea urchins. They certainly are gorgeous little fish but unfortunately there was nothing else worth taking note of on this dive.

Overall this second day was not so great and our expectation for great macro diving was certainly not met. We found later that the islands that we had visited are not the best places to see the creatures we wanted to see. We decided that our choice of dive company did not really suit us. I guess we are a bit snobby about our diving but we did shell out quite a bit of money and we had hoped for better quality of dive guides. We had not come at the best time of year since the visibility was pretty piss poor and some of the bigger pelagics were not around. Sipidan had been really nice but our expectations had been a bit too big. But we would both like to try it again sometime when we have a bit larger budget to spend more time and do it with a different company.