Awesome Diving

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We traveled to an island called Sipidan which is renowned for its natural beauty. It has been classed amongst the top three sites to dive worldwide.
There are only 100 people permitted onto the island at any one time, in order to preserve its beauty. We booked our dives and caught a speed boat out to the site. It was so beautiful the nicest beach I have ever seen. It had the whitest sand and the clearest sea water, just heaven.
On our 3 dives we saw sharks, thousands of turtles (some of them were really huge), a school of Bump head parrot fist which were just massive!!! Moray eels, sting ray and hundreds of other species swimming around.
The island is surrounded by a 600meter drop off; only 6 meters from the shore (where the water is at shoulder level) there is the drop, a sheer wall that plunges to the depth of 600metres!!!! We only swam to 33metres which is more than I am qualified to swim to, not to mention James who is only meant to dive to 18metres. Naughty instructor!!!
The beach was patrolled by the larges monitor lizards who scavenged around the divers for food. If one came too close the instructor would scare it off with a stick.
We left Sipidan to travel to another island where the rest of the people we met in the jungle were staying. The island was called Mabul it was tiny. Home to around 150 locals who lived on houses supported by stilts in the ocean. We stayed here for two nights, went snorkeling and tried our hand at fishing off the veranda using a plastic bottle some fishing line and a small hook. We began the day with some tuna as bait, we watched as the local children pulled in fish after fish (not that they were more than 3 inches big) but still it was more than we had managed to catch. The hours passed and we waded around in the water dragging our lines until we were down to the last of the bait, James had told me the location of a big fish he had been trying hard to lure, so I dropped my line next to the stone. An arm reached out and took my bait, I waited a few seconds and reeled in the line it was heavy, I had managed to catch something!!!! I splashed back to the water house (our b&b on stilts) to show all the other guests that we had finally managed to catch something, everyone cheered when they saw my line but we were all left puzzled as to what exactly I had managed to catch. It squirmed its 5 black spiky looking legs and wriggled on the floor. We were eventually informed that it was a type of star fish, so we threw it back. We ate dinner and some locals sat on the veranda under the stars and played their guitars singing popular songs, drinking Malaysian whiskey and coke. We all gathered round before we went to sit on the speed boat to try and catch a fish in the dark using a very smelly octopus James had bought from a local as bait. We were trying to fish until around 2am all we managed to catch were baby moray eels which just tangled the line into a huge knot. It was a beautiful nigh under the moon and the stars, but we got really sick and tired of fishing and retired to our beds.

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Comments

[DEANO downunder]

Borneo
You guys sound to be having a ball really envious of yer climb up Kota Kinabalu cos we wanted to do it a few years ago but not enough time. tek care and see u in Cairns for a beer or two xx