Day 5 - Kapalai and Mabul

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The alarm was set for a little later on for today (7am) as there is no deadline on Mabul or Kapalai for registering divers like there is on Sipadan.

Breakfast out the way (I'm going to miss a morning of all you can eat fresh food like that) and then off to Kapalai which is a collection of raised huts in the middle of the sea with no actual visible land. We didn't hire a camera for this one so no underwater photos this time.

Apparently there had been a storm over night (even with the immense pain of the sunburn, we still didn't wake up for it) so the air was noticeably cooler, the water was significantly colder and the visibility was considerably worse. Thankfully (?) though, Kapalai and Mabul are famous for their macro diving so we weren't going to be peering out into the deep blue for anything, all the stuff we were looking at was in the sand and corals.

So at Kapalai we saw some more eels, a yellow frogfish, the usual plethora of fish and another ghost pipefish. I was adament that the one I managed to photgraph the day before when she wasn't there was, somehow, a much better variety of ghost pipefish but she wasn't believing it for a second!

From there it was backto the rig for an hour before diving off the otherside of Mabul. That dive was a very nice one. Apparently Liz saw a ray darting across the bottom after it was spooked by our divemaster but I didn't see it. We did both see a mahoosive cuttlefish though, plenty of crocodile fish, a very colourful nudibranch and - as always - the usual smattering of colour that are the resident tropical reef fish.

Back to the rig and then out for the final dive. A sandy dive with no corals so, obviously there were a few less things to see. This did give us a good chance to practise our buoyancy But we did see two more ghost pipefish, a pair of long snout pipfish, two different kinds of dwarf lion fish and a ginormous green turtle that was having a sleep on the sand.

Then it was back to the rig for something to eat and a few beers before bed and a lie in before heading off into the jungle

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