[Jules]

At the end of October 07 I was suffering from “Post Galapagos Blues”, a curious ailment brought on by the fairly certain feeling that diving would never be exciting again after the thrills of diving with hundreds of hammerheads in fast currents and the majesty of seeing whale-sharks the size of juggernauts cruising beneath you during your Suunto stop. The only certain cure for post holiday blues is definitely to book another holiday and so when Phil suggested that he would love to return to Sipadan (having been there 10 years ago) it didn’t take much persuasion to get me on the net searching for flights and accommodation.

Sipadan is on all those lists of the best places in the world to dive but apart from that I knew nothing about it and after a bit of reading I discovered that the island of Sipadan sits off the north east coast of Borneo in a region of Malaysia called Sabah. To reduce ecological impact it’s no longer permitted to stay on Sipadan and hence divers usually stay on the two adjacent islands of Kapilai and Mabul. Kapilai is hardly an island at all, it’s a sand bank with some water bungalows on, Mabul is a proper island and about half of it is SMART, the Sipadan Mabul Resort, the other half being populated by locals.

It’s quite a long way away! Our flights were with Emirates so we flew Manchester to Dubai, Dubai to Kuala Lumpor, Kuala Lumpor to Kota Kinabalu, Kota Kinabalu to Tawau. This took about a day and a half. We then stayed overnight in Tawau before being transferred by air-conditioned minibus to Semporna Jetty and collected by one of the SMART boats.



The resort itself is very casual and friendly, great food and very focussed on diving. Within an hour of arriving you find yourself on a boat on the way to doing a checkout /weight check dive. I didn’t take my camera as things were a bit rushed (and that’s how cameras get drowned) and consequently on the check out dive on the house reef we saw lots of frog fish, leaf fish and a large variety of nudibranchs! The second dive that day was equally good and we topped off the day with a third night dive off the jetty. The package includes 3 dives a day and you can do night dives off the jetty for free. There are staff there to assist you in and out and provide limited surface cover with a boat on standby. You can also book a boat night dive for additional cost but we never bothered with this as the jetty night dive had plenty to offer.

Over the next 11 days we dived our socks off (I logged 34 and phil logged 36). SMART organise the diving so that you go over to Sipadan, which is about 35 minutes by fast boat, and do two dives with an hour surface interval and tea break in between. There is a limit to the number of boats and divers that can be there at any one time so your slot is either 05:30… 09:00… or 13:00. The third dive of the day (or the first if you are on the 13:00 slot) will be one of the many sites around Mabul or Kapilai , both excellent venues for some of the best muck diving in the world.

I won’t retype my entire log here but instead chose a few dives to record.

8.2.08 Sipadan – Baracuda point
Massive and stunning wall which seemed to go down to infinity. We must have seen about 20 turtles, all of whom let us take their portraits. There were a lot of small sharks (whitetips) on a flattened out area known as “the runway”

9.2.08 Kapilai Magic garden
A small reef off Kapilai marked by a shotline, lots of amazing machro subjects, just a shame that our group consisted of 8 photographers! We tagged along at the back of the group as queueing up to take photographs is quite frankly boring. We did see some stunning subjects though, including a flambouyant Cuttle fish, which I caught feeding and a blue ribbon eel.








And of course a liberal sprinkling of nudibranchs







to be continued