SCUBA DIVING IN SIPIDAN

Well I made it from Sandakan to Semporna after a 6 hour bus journey without Lucy as she headed back to KK to do her Open Water course. I was really "Lucky" and Sophia the Russian lady was on my bus and sat next to me. Gosh this women does not come up for air and says and does exactly what she wants, she's around 60 and has been travelling for years so she has some great stories and I guess she kept me entertained. It was around 8pm when we arrived and decided we'd stay in dorm room as it was the cheapest option. We stayed at Dragon Inn, which were floating bungalows on stilts. We met a girl in our room called Georgina and she came with us for some street food. I had an early night and was excited to be picked up tomorrow to stay at The Seaventures Oil Rig ready for some diving in Sipadan.

I arrived at The Oil Rig along with Petra, Matt, Melanie and Mike, firstly the rig was incredible, not what I was expecting at all. Seaventures oil rig is based in the heart of the coral triangle and the middle of the three islands, Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai. There is a lift that lowers you into the water for your dives or onto the boat means that diving could not be easier! The Rig has one of the best house reefs in the area and an abundance of marine life. There is something different to find on every dive. The rig really is the coolest yet strangest place I have ever stayed, I loved it! The food amazing and ranges from western to Asian cuisine, and plenty of it. Every day was different and there was always desert :-) I was hoping to lose weight by not drinking for a few days and being "active" but we all know that it's the laziest sport so I guess not so much :-/

I had a room to myself with all the mod cons and it was so nice to be on my own for a while as I hadn't spent any time alone since travelling. There was an awesome Sun Deck, which I particularly liked it has a fantastic 360 degree view of the islands around and was the perfect way to end a day of diving with a cold beer and warm sea breezes...The sunsets were beautiful and there was also a Pink Full moon.

The first dive was under the rig, and was really cool and so nice to get back into the ocean again, and in the afternoon we went to Kapalei which was beautiful, we saw Turtles and lots of smaller colorful fish. Ok so I could write a lot more on it but I'm too excited and just want get on writing about Sipadan. It was on the second day that we were going to dive in Sipadan, and oh yes it all came down to this day being amazing. To start I thought it'd be worth explaining why Sipadan is such a special dive site. Beside the location which is 5 degrees north of the equator and being surrounded by the warm currents of the Celebs Sea, Sipadan is one of a few Oceanic islands in the world. What this means is that the actual island itself isn't directly connected to the Earths mantel, the island was formed by coral that grew on top of an extinct Volcano which in total rises 600m from the seabed. It's because of the shear amount of coral that the island is surrounded by the marine life it has. Anyway geography lesson over, in total we did three dives, first was at a dive site called South Point. Now on previous dives I've been excited to see one or two Turtles, on this dive we were greeted by a couple of Mating Turtles on the surface of the water, and in total on this dive we must have seen at least 20 turtles. As on all the dives the coral garden was beautiful but on the first dive particularly. The second dive was by far my favorite and took place at Barracuda point. We had to contend with really strong currents at this site which was fun, when we first descended we were greeted by a school of Jack fish at least 200 strong all together forming a huge moving silver wall. Following the Jack fish experience we floated further along the dive site to meet again a huge school of giant barracuda. This was awesome we clung onto some rock as not to be swept away by the current while around 100 Barracuda proceeded to pass over our heads. The final dive took us to the Hanging Gardens and as with all the dives we came face to face with Mr Shark. We saw grey tip, white tip, and black tip sharks and on our final dive we must have seen about ten of them. Equally impressive were the Bump Head Parrot fish---on one dive a troop of them...hundreds strong patrolled the Reef. They are huge Grey fish with a vicious looking Parrot beak (harmless though), perhaps 3 to 4 feet or so long, 2 to 3 deep!! All in all my dive experience was how I expected, just AMAZING, and I can now see why it's the 2nd best dive site in the world.

Afterwards we got the boat back to Semporna and I had beers with my dive buddies, Matt,Mel,Fred*** and Nicolai before we all got the night bus back to Kota Kinabalu.