Sipadan – a divers dream | Kelissa Brockett

Hundreds of turtles in the area

One of the top dive sites in the world in Sabah, Malaysia. We did 6 dives on Sipadan including Barracuda point, south tip, hanging garden and turtle cave. All were incredible. Unfortunately we didn’t spot hammerheads but the diversity and abundance of coral and marine life with plentiful grey and white tip reef sharks and turtles made it live up to its name. Swimming in the barracuda eye was an experience like no other, looking around and these huge fish surrounding you out in the blue is just incredible, the coral life was similar to the Great Barrier Reef, flourishing with life and colour, teaming with schools of smaller brightly coloured fish.

The walls are almost vertical drops down to 600m. Just knowing that and looking out into the blue increases the adrenalin. Covered in sea fans, fringing coral and rocks the lively walls are excellent dives. There were a couple of dives where we got to play through huge schools of jacks, thousands of these fish coming straight towards you as our guide was herding them our direction.

Palau Sipadan

A big highlight of the day for me was the school of around 70 bump-head parrot fish, they are very unfortunate looking fish, so cute but yet so ugly! The fish were huge and most were in a ‘pack’ to make them look more intimidating and scary to ward off any predators.

Both times we dives south tip i lost count as to how many sharks we saw, some swimming, some sleeping, how can people be scared of these creatures!??! As well as the sharks, without a doubt on every dive we saw over 5 large turtles, usually green sea turtles, the average size was around 2-3ft.

Even though i did spot and snap a few nudibranchs, Sipadan is not the place to look for macro life, its the places to search for the larger creatures. If your after macro life, Mabul and Kapalai are definitely the places to visit.