Finally! After 9 months of living in Penang in the coral triangle, we spent the Malaysia Day holiday weekend in Sabah for our first dive trip in Southeast Asia. We went for Sipadan Island which is on the various lists of Jacques Cousteau’s favorite dive sites (DIVE magazine, Scuba Diving and PADI Blog). We chose Seaventures Dive Rig for a new and novel experience (staying on an oil rig converted to a dive resort) and guaranteed Sipadan permits (which are limited to 176 permits per day shared by all resorts and operators).
Travel was “planes, buses, and ferries” instead of “planes, trains and automobiles.” We flew Penang-to-KL and KL-to-Tawau on Batik Malaysia. We flew on Malaysia Airlines on the way back because the flight times worked out, and we get frequent flier mileage credit. The drive from Tawau airport to our hotel in Semporna was a prepaid private transfer we found on Klook. Seaventures handled the hotel pick up and ferry to Mabul.
Our itinerary included 4 days of diving:
- Arrival day, Friday: check out in Mabul and house reef
- Day 2, Saturday: Sipadan and Mabul plus a night dive below the rig
- Day 3, Sunday: Kapalai and Mabul
- Day 4, Monday: Kapalai and Mabul
We saw a few Disney stars along the way as Marlin, Nemo and Gil from Finding Nemo made appearances. Hard to believe that movie is over 20 years old now?!?
If you read about Sipadan, you’ll know the highlights include the barracuda tornado and schooling bumphead parrotfish. Sipadan did not disappoint. We were fortunate enough to see two separate schools of barracuda and the bumphead parrotfish. A couple white tip reef sharks swam by in the distance to add to the experience.
On our arrival day, I did not take my camera for the orientation dive. Like buying a snowblower to keep the snow away, no camera means I’m going to see something amazing. We saw a red frogfish, and so we were determined to get photos throughout our stay to capture the memory. We were able to find small orange and yellow but not the first red fella. We also found the enormous brown frogfish who lives in the recycled bottle coral nursery.
Nudibranchs, or sea slugs for the colloquial name, were high on our list for photo subjects for our first adventure in Southeast Asia. Again, Sipadan did not disappoint!
These are all taken with an iPhone 13 Pro Max inside a Sea Life SportDiver housing with a narrow beam dive light on a flexible arm. I bought a very narrow beam snoot light (DivePro MP30) but found that most of these critters were too big for the spot size, so I switched to the standard dive light (DivePro S10)and was happy with that setup.
Glenn, what is the white Nudi with sand all over it?
Masters of camouflage we on display in Borneo. Our night dive highlight, thanks to Ryan, was a cuttlefish – our first sighting and was close to 2 feet long. We saw a number of crocodilefish and scorpionfish and even managed to spot a stonefish.
Back to the tiny critters, we saw several pipefish and two juvenile dragon sea moths.
Here’s another teeny tiny fish we couldn’t identify. Glenn? Help!
In the long and creepy category, we saw a number of different types of eels, a 10-foot long krait (also called a sea snake), and sea cucumber
More stuff
Wow! What an amazing experience. This is awesome Ryan and Scott. Love living through you both!
Beautiful!
Beautiful! We sure are going to miss you guys this Thanksgiving!!
Thank you for sharing the amazing photos whole bunch of new critters to view the SportDiver housing and the iPhone are an amazing combination. Check out our BVI dive trip. Got some nice photos with that same set up. Great pics. Keep them coming. Glad you guys are safe and having a good time in life hope to see you soon Brian and Kim.
Oh my gosh! These photos and videos are amazing. Thank you for sharing.