Diving in Borneo, Sipidan and surrounding Islands

This is wayyyyy overdue - about 2 weeks ago now!

I was met at Tawau airport by Scuba Junkies staff, hooray (always nice to see your name on a piece of paper at the airport), and driven to Semporna - the base hub for diving the islands. It takes an hour from Tawau airport to Semporna, driving mile after mile through palm oil plantations. I arrived late morning and booked in all my diving, one day at Sibuan, 2 days at Sipidan, then a 4 day rescue diver course.
Scuba Junkies have a backpacker hostel, super cheap with an amazing breakfast. They also have a resort on the island of Mabul, it's more expensive, but it's absolutely gorgeous. The town of Semporna is pretty scuzzy, stinky and dirty - only really explored once, and that was enough. People come here to dive, and that's it! There is a pretty cool fish market, pretty stinky too!
The boats all leave at 8am. 3 dives and lunch, returning at around 5pm. It's a long fun day. The sun is really strong, and divers don't usually have much time to build up their tans...they all come back with RED faces!
The first day was pretty standard diving, at Sibuan Island. I'd seen most of the sea life before, and with a sandy bottom, there wasn't a vast reef. Still a great day diving though.
The 2nd and 3rd days I was diving at Sipidan...the golden egg of these islands. Sipidan is a protected nature reserve and has a permit system, I think about 150 permits per day, somewhere in that region anyway. There are no resorts on the island, only a military base. Until 2005 there were a number of resorts, and no limit to the dives. People do think that the reef has recovered significantly as a result of this heightened protection, so that's great.
The minute we jumped into the water, we knew this was going to be a spectacular day of diving.
Reef sharks, and turtles, too many to count! 2 really nice wall dives in the morning. Our 3rd dive was at 'Barracuda Point'. The minute we jumped in the water we were surrounded by a tornado of big eye trevally, or 'jack fish'. Very cool. Then a few minutes later, a huge huge huge school of chevron barracuda came by. Again, sharks and turtles galore...insane.
The rescue diver course was fantastic - really important. Our teacher and the dive master who was helping us were hilarious - on our practical dive, they literally had every problem you could think of. I'd look around, one of them would have lost their mask...or a fin...or they'd be floating upwards, or sunk on the bottom, or their BCD would be floating behind them, or they had spat out their regulator, or they'd be having a panic attack...endless problems!! These dives were really exciting!! Challenging too!
Best diving I've ever done. I will definitely be going back there to do more fun diving.
I almost left without my passport, which could have been exciting...but all worked out in the end. Off to Singapore!