Sabah, Borneo
<Well the flight over here sucked really bad, not only did we have to wake up at stupid o’clock in the morning, the turbulance was awful! I know Maryanne, Mark and Deb all enjoyed it but it freaked me out for the whole flight! Thankfully we made it in one piece! Borneo is so beautiful, we had a hour and a half drive to the ferry were we saw almost every type of palm tree there is. Okay probably not every type but pretty darn close! There was a bit of rain on the ferry ride to the dive platform, but luckily we out ran it and had a nice sunny arrival. The boat pulled up to the bottom of the platform where they lowered the lift to bring us up! How cool!! We dropped our gear off, and straight up set it up for our check dive in an hour! Quickly we ran up stairs put our stuff in the room and then back downstairs for a quick lunch. Then we headed under the platform which gets down to about 16m. Wow there were loads of Scorpian Fish of different sizes and colors, 1/2 meter long crocodile fish, common and spotfin lionfish, moray eels, a frog fish out swimming around, bumphead parrot fish, 3 big box fish! Plus tons of the usual fish, wow what a dive! Everywhere you looked was something that used to be hard to find in Koh Tao but here is all over! After an hour surface interval we were back in the water to Mabul to a site called Paradise! Another great dive seeing Yellow Trumphet Fish, Razor fish, Leaf fish, 2 large cuddle fish, jaw fish, turtles, nudis, pipe fish, box fish, scribbled file fish, puffers, box fish!! The diving just gets better and better! After the dive came back to the platform setup our gear for our night dive! An hour later! Can’t believe we got in three dives on the first day! Oh yeah and the best part besides the 4 of us there was only one other diver!! We had the place to ourselves, the weather is sunny and warm and visibility quite good. After a small dinner we crashed since we had to be up early for our dive at Sipadan! Woke up the following day to Maryanne being sick 🙁 so no diving for her in the morning. I know she was really upset not to go diving. So Mark, Deb, Frank other diver and I headed to Sipadan. The water was flat and the sun was out for our 20 min boat ride. Our first site was Baracuda Point, not many baracudas though. However it was a nice wall that dropped off to 600m, so you had to be sure not go too deep 🙂 Visibility was 20-30m and we saw plenty – sharks, seal puffers, fire gobies, octopuss, many types of angel fish, eels, bannerfish and many types of triggers. After a snack on the beach we jumped back in to do a nice wall drift dive! The coolest thing we saw was probably Turtle Tomb, which is a huge cave in the wall at about 21m that holds many skeletons of turtles. We didn’t go in far enough, but is was still amazing. On the way out there was the biggest turtle I have every seen sleeping against the wall! There was also clown trigger fish, Napolian Wrasse, Magpie and Harlequin sweetligps, blotched porcupine puffer, seal puffers! Amazing can’t even describe it! That was only in the morning we still had three more dives that day! All just as good!
Today had to be the best visibility wise 30 to 40m at Sipadan. Turtles, turtles and more turtles! Wow Travis and Yvonne this reminded us of that snorkel in the Maldives behind your bungalow, but with three times the amount of fish! I tell ya even the safety stops are amazing to see the loads of differnt types butterfly, juvenile triggers, parrot fishes, wrasses, puffers, box fish. This is so not Koh Tao, there is no hunting for stuff to see it is out in the open! Incredible
Below is some pictures that our friend Mark took of the Dives here in Sipadan. Enjoy!
Tags: Malaysia
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The colors in the pics are so vibrant! Nice job Mark!
Unbelievable pictures….. wish I were there.
Mom