ISSUE 20 ARCHIVE - SIPADAN

Maxim Vinciguerra

In 2013 I visited North Borneo and landed myself a dream job of guiding Sipadan. Now I'm back in blustery cold England, locked in a psychiatric hospital and trying to explain to the doctors my decision for returning.

Many people hear through the grapevine that there's a place called Sipadan that has some great diving. The grapevine doesn't lie, but it doesn't make too much noise about the other islands around North Borneo. If your only interest is diving Sipadan and have a reasonable budget available, you could look at staying on one of the resort islands like Mabul, or on the converted oil rig.

Alternatively you could go for the slightly more budget option of staying in Semporna and heading out from there. It is a small fishing town with a very busy local food market which I often frequented to buy cake.

The most entertaining thing to do in Semporna besides watching TV or getting drunk is watching people attempt to parallel park. On average it takes 4 minutes for them to wiggle back and forwards into a space large enough for a bus. The parking manoeuvre always starts with a nose first entry and 90% of the time ends up with the vehicle being abandoned, either diagonally or three feet from the pavement. Amazingly though, there are very few cars with dents in them.

Most people come here because they've heard about Sipadan. No doubt it is world class and I'll explain why shortly, but it isn't the only island worth visiting from here and the others shouldn't be overlooked.

Mantabuan is a 45 minute boat ride from Semporna. It is surrounded by the healthiest and most intact reefs in the area outside of Sipadan. If corals are your thing, it is certainly worth visiting.

Sibuan island is just 35 minutes away. It is a beautiful small island and a great place to do your open water course. After years of teaching confined water dives in a chlorinated swimming pool, I nearly spat out my reg while teaching my first open water course here when we were joined by a hawksbill turtle on confined water dive three. I had to punch my students afterwards as punishment for being so spoiled. It's not just a great training site though. If you like macro life, in some areas you'll find the nudibranches having a party with signal gobies and frogfish bringing their unique dance moves. Some of the other life you might find there include, snowflake moray eels, octopus, lionfish, blue spotted ribbontail rays and if you're lucky, you might even be visited by an eagle ray.

Mataking has a wreck, which helped quench my heavy wreck addiction. Without it, I'd have been curled up in a ball crying in a cold sweat. There are also increasing numbers of jackfish followed by their nemesis the giant trevally. One of the coolest things at Mataking is George the giant barracuda who hangs out under the jetty.

He probably ate all of his friends. But let's go back to Sipadan (oh how I wish I could) There was a film in the mid-nineties about some bloke named Woodland Bump, or something like that. He was tucking into a big box of sandwiches not really sure what the fillings were. Sipadan is a bit like that. You know for sure there'll be bread but the fillings can surprise you every time. The bread is the certainties, which are that you'll see whitetip reef sharks, turtles, thousands of jackfish, deep walls and great corals. The fillings, like a bumphead parrotfish stampede, or the barracuda tornado are the things that make Sipadan great.

All around Sipadan the reefs are pristine and covered in a wide variety of marine life, including spadefish, octopus, oriental sweetlips, unicornfish and so on. If I could list all 3000 species, I'd be quite impressed with myself.

One dive that stands out above all others is Barracuda point. It can have it all. Sometimes, albeit on rare occasions, you can be truly spoilt, jumping in at the beginning of the dive with the bumphead parrotfish smashing into the reef. They are quite possibly related to Frankenstein's monster. Individually they're not too much to get excited about, but a group of over 100 is hugely entertaining. Then you can watch around two-thousand wide-eyed jackfish trying to escape from a feeding frenzy of whitetip reef sharks, grey reef sharks and giant trevally before continuing along the top of the wall to meet the swirling barracuda.

The barracuda tornado happens when the barracuda feel threatened by predators such as dogtooth tuna. 45 It is without a doubt one of the most amazing spectacles you could hope to see underwater.

They start by forming a large spinning circle before spiraling up to the surface and creating a rotating column. Then all of the barracuda move up to the surface, still spinning in a large circle before funneling down to the seabed and then disappearing off into the distance in a long chain.

The whole event can last as little as a minute or two, which is hardly enough time to commit it to your memory banks, but it is something never to forget.

After that, heading into a channel is a large rock where you can be a voyeur watching turtles getting cleaned. As you continue along the channel you'll come across many whitetip sharks resting on the bottom, some of which will allow you to get quite close enough to take a decent picture. Where you end the dive depends on how long you spend at each point, along with the current, which at times can be very strong. Barracuda point is also great done as a deep dive. It's not a common route to take, but leaving the jackfish and dropping straight down to 30m+ you are more likely to see grey reef sharks, large groupers and hundreds of redtooth triggerfish fluttering alongside the steep sloping wall.

There is so much more to Sipadan than Barracuda Point, but if you could only do one dive there, that would probably be it. Sipadan really does kick-ass!