Sipadan | Meet Malaysia
4. The Deluxe Dive Sites
It’s on the whiteboard now:
Sipadan.
My name is written there. Boat leaves at 6 AM.
The staff reminds us to bring our certification cards. Only advanced divers are permitted to dive Sipadan, and most dive resorts prefer that you’ve logged about 50 dives.
The ocean gods must have taken pity on me because the surf has mellowed out considerably since day one and we enjoy a nice, smooth crossing from Mabul.
As we zip across the passage, the turquoise water turns dark blue.
Sipadan is Malaysia’s only oceanic island. It’s a seamount formed over thousands of years as coral stacked up on the peak of an ancient underwater volcano. Its location in the open ocean draws millions of pelagic fish, including schools of jack, barracuda, and hammerhead sharks, and whale sharks pass through in March and April. In the winter, the colder water brings even more species of shark, like thresher and zebra sharks.
We get our first glimpse of the little island as the dive boat powers down and gently comes to a rest on the beach.
Sabah Parks manages the island and only grants 120 visitation permits per day. The permits are allocated to each of the resorts approved to dive Sipadan, and are doled out among diving and snorkeling groups.
The small dive shops get fewer permits while the big resorts get more permits.
The small dive shops are only allowed to dive in the afternoon. The big resorts get to come in the morning.
On the surface interval, divers can lunch at the picnic area and use the well-maintained restrooms.
We step onto the island and walk over to a wooden lodge where a park ranger sits on the porch. One by one, we show him our certification cards and he makes sure they match our passport information on file. When everyone’s been verified, he gives the crew a special flag to display on the boat that lets the dive marshals know we’ve been cleared for diving.
The dive marshals patrol the island in a police boat. They’ll randomly check in on dive groups and take underwater photos of the divers. If they catch you making flagrant violations — such as kicking coral — they’ll bring you to the lodge after the dive and confront you with the evidence of your crimes. They’re authorized to fine you as much as $650 for serious and repeat offenses.
“They’re getting some of the dive centers from Semporna,” says Scott. “There’s a lot of dive centers over there. For us big resorts, they don’t really follow us. They know our standards.”
I test my camera as we gear up for the first dive. Scott knows I enjoy taking photos of the reef.
“Don’t stop to take pictures of the coral or little fish,” he tells our group — but mostly me.
“We’re looking for the big stuff. That’s why you came here.”
Our first dive is at Sipadan’s most famous dive site: Barracuda Point.
I’m blown away by the size of Sipadan’s walls. She’s an iceberg of an island, very small on top but gargantuan beneath the water.
She’s got a shallow, inner reef that starts at the beach and meanders a couple hundred yards off-shore.
Then the reef buckles, kneeling down to 30 feet, and — like an Olympic diver leaping from a platform — makes a sudden and death-defying plunge into the depths of the ocean, thousands of feet straight-down.
The first 10 minutes are sensory overload. I’m not sure where to look. At the gleaming coral in the shallows? The big blue void of the open ocean? The shadowy depths of the drop-off? There’s a lot to process.
True to its name, there’s a school of great barracuda on the horizon, but we don’t get much of a look at it before we’re swept up by the current and enter a drift dive.
We drift right into a school of humphead parrotfish. They’re really big fish and lounge above the coral like a herd of grazing cows.
As we round the corner of the reef we drift over a school of jackfish. We’ve only been diving for 30 minutes and we’ve already encountered schools of barracuda, humphead parrotfish, and now jackfish.
That’s why this dive site is famous.
A whitetip reef shark at Barracuda Point.
“Everyone likes Barracuda Point,” says Scott. “You got a little bit of everything out there. There’s wall dives. There’s current. There’s lots and lots of beautiful corals, too.”
Oh, the coral.
The walls at Sipadan are fortified top-to-bottom by coral. From a distance, it’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at hard coral or soft coral, this species or that species. The entire wall is a lush, sweeping coral garden. It seems like every patch of coral has at least 5 different species.
Although Scott told me not to prioritize the coral, I have a difficult time prying my eyes from the textures, colors, and enormity of the reef. I bemoan the fact that I don’t have lights strong enough to snap a good reefscape.
The east and west sides of the island have the most spectacular coral walls, especially the dive sites Coral Gardens and Hanging Gardens. Exactly as they sound.
I get two days of diving at Sipadan and on both days South Point gives us the luckiest hand.
“At the end of South Point you’re gonna see all these soft and hard corals and there’s a lot of turtles out there,” says Scott. “South Point is popular with sharks, as well.”
At South Point we encounter an enormous school of jackfish — the quintessence of Sipadan diving.
We also go looking for hammerheads.
Scott and his co-workers pride themselves on their “hammerhead hunting.” They look for the lone hammerhead shark that’s scouting the edge of the reef, and when they spot one they follow it out to sea. If they keep a good pace, the scout will lead them right to the school.
In probably the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve done as a scuba diver, we kick away from the island and swim out to the deep blue, with thousands of feet of who knows what beneath us. This is probably the closest I’ll come to a spacewalk. It’s a rad detour, even though we don’t find the hammerheads.
Sipadan gives me a newfound appreciation for two animals.
First, there’s the whitetip reef shark.
I’m more of a blacktip kind of guy, but I like how the whitetips lie down on the corners of the island, where the current runs strong and fast. When they sense prey nearby they lift off like Apache helicopters and take flight in the underwater jet stream.
Second is the sea turtle.
On my dive adventures, I had started getting bored of sea turtles because they really don’t do much of anything; they’re the stoners of the ocean, as my brother likes to say. Sleeping, chewing grass, and looking rather lazy.
It’s tough for a sea turtle cynic to admit, but… the Sipadan turtles are pretty rad.
Sea turtles use the island as a mating and nesting ground, so naturally they’re everywhere at Sipadan. It’s not uncommon to spot between 20 – 30 turtles on a single dive. Look up, look down, look around — there’s probably at least one sea turtle in your line of sight at all times.
The island has small, juvenile turtles and also the largest sea turtles I’ve ever seen, weighing at least 1,000 pounds and easily the biggest permanent residents of Sipadan. Really they’re more like boulders than turtles, and it’s amazing they’re strong enough to lift themselves off the coral.
And these turtles ‘ain’t shy. They let divers get pretty close to them, and sometimes they get pretty close to you — a big one comes straight at me, like it’s going to snag my BCD and drag me down into the abyss. My life flashes before my eyes; I never thought I’d die in the cold, murderous beak of a sea turtle.
Turtle Patch is a shallow dive site where the juvenile turtles hang out.
On a dive anywhere else in the world, each diver would line up and wait their turn to snap a photo of the sea turtle. We don’t have to do that at Turtle Patch because there’s enough sea turtles here for everyone in our group. You get a sea turtle! You get a sea turtle! Everybody gets a sea turtle! There’s plenty of sea turtles to go around.
It’s a fun time underwater. I keep a respectful distance and use my camera zoom to snap a few pics.
When the day’s diving is done, Scott looks as happy as his divers.
“We dive almost every day at Mabul and Sipadan, right? 9 years working as a dive professional — I still got that excitement in me.
“It’s not just the guests that want to see this stuff at Sipadan. I also want to see this stuff!”