Sorry it's been so long, team... I got carried away building a video game. Well the story has few remaining chapters - and I would be sad to not finish them. So despite this adventure starting nearly five years ago to the day, I'll now try to wrap up this write up of my travelling journal.
For the record this post covers the best day of diving I have ever done.
The following day dawned. I was up so early that I had eaten and was waiting on the jetty pretty much before anyone else had even got up! Eventually the lucky divers who would be on the boat for Sipadan turned up and we set off.
It probably comes as no surprise that I had an awesome time.
The first site was south point. We went down to 30m. The coral was spectacular and saw a huge quantity of white tip sharks & turtles. I hadn’t seen a shark before so to glide alongside these graceful hunters was a fantastic experience and was happy to check it off my bucket list.
The second spot was barracuda point. Almost immediately after beginning my descent along the guide rope I was engulfed in a wall of great trevali, we emerged beneath the shoal and looked back up but couldn’t see the surface above us. The coral was beautiful and abounded with life. There were jacks, more turtles; and black & white tip sharks.
The last of the dives was known as “drop off”. We coasted along a sheer face of coral that sank vertically into the deep, it went way beneath our 30m limit. There was less wildlife here, but I still saw an octupus and some fish were to be seen. We also ventured into a cave on this dive. We didn’t go far in but it was a taster for what cave diving was like. Embarrassingly at one point I did lose control of my balance a little bit and my tank hit the cave roof before I could correct. Thankfully nobody appeared to notice.
After every dive after surfacing we all had big stupid grins on our faces. Even now I struggle to articulate how good it was. My expectations of the diving, and the stay on the island in general had been more than surpassed.
For the record this post covers the best day of diving I have ever done.
The following day dawned. I was up so early that I had eaten and was waiting on the jetty pretty much before anyone else had even got up! Eventually the lucky divers who would be on the boat for Sipadan turned up and we set off.
It probably comes as no surprise that I had an awesome time.
The first site was south point. We went down to 30m. The coral was spectacular and saw a huge quantity of white tip sharks & turtles. I hadn’t seen a shark before so to glide alongside these graceful hunters was a fantastic experience and was happy to check it off my bucket list.
The second spot was barracuda point. Almost immediately after beginning my descent along the guide rope I was engulfed in a wall of great trevali, we emerged beneath the shoal and looked back up but couldn’t see the surface above us. The coral was beautiful and abounded with life. There were jacks, more turtles; and black & white tip sharks.
The last of the dives was known as “drop off”. We coasted along a sheer face of coral that sank vertically into the deep, it went way beneath our 30m limit. There was less wildlife here, but I still saw an octupus and some fish were to be seen. We also ventured into a cave on this dive. We didn’t go far in but it was a taster for what cave diving was like. Embarrassingly at one point I did lose control of my balance a little bit and my tank hit the cave roof before I could correct. Thankfully nobody appeared to notice.
After every dive after surfacing we all had big stupid grins on our faces. Even now I struggle to articulate how good it was. My expectations of the diving, and the stay on the island in general had been more than surpassed.
