Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai

From 9 December to 15 December, I was with the Pretty Lady and a friend, CY at a little resort off the coast of Sabah (the Malaysian part of Borneo), slightly misnamed Sipadan Water Village. It's actually on Mabul island, Sipadan having been closed since a an accident on a construction barge sheared off the top of a major coral reef and dumped a ton of bricks on to the main drop off in 2006. Only military personnel are allowed to stay on the island now.

So we had to stay on Mabul, and had to travel to Sipadan daily. This wasn't a big deal despite the daily limit on the number of divers - it was low season and there were too few divers at all the resorts to fill up the daily quota!

I made about 14 dives over the week, one or two more than the Pretty Lady did. We saw a hammerhead shark (one of two the guide had seen in 2007 - we were very lucky), who surprised a keen photographer, buzzed the dive guide, rounded us twice and swam off into the blue. We saw 20 to 30 turtles, including a giant that was snoozing at the base of the marker buoy on the house reef, Paradise 1. We saw several thousand schooling barracuda at Barracuda Point. We saw a school of bump-head parrotfish make their round island morning swim, 3 times. We saw 2 huge snow crabs on a night dive. We saw a titan triggerfish building its nest. We saw 2 frogfish lurking in an artificial reef underneath a converted oil rig. We saw numerous shrimps , nudibranches and crabs, some almost too tiny to see.

It was a wonderful trip, and I'm a little sorry I didn't buy a camera and a casing at Changi Airport. I probably wouldn't have caught the hammerhead though. Maybe next time!