Sipadan | Meet Malaysia
Meet Malaysia is a blog series that explores the most amazing dive destinations in Malaysia, with insights by the locals who know them best.
Author: Zachary Cabading
Published: August 30, 2023
“I have seen other places like Sipadan, 45 years ago, but now no more. Now we have found an untouched piece of art.”
— Jacques Cousteau
Few islands offer a spectacle more immaculate than mighty Sipadan.
Famous for schools of pelagic fish, deep coral walls, and a staggering number of sharks and sea turtles, Sipadan is a bucket-list destination for divers far and wide.
This single, tiny island — which you could walk a circle around in just about 30 minutes — is the definition of a natural aquarium, so small yet so densely packed with marine life.
Equally astonishing is the lionhearted effort made by the government and dive resorts to protect the island’s incredible habitat.
In late July, a speedboat carries me to Pulau Mabul, the gateway island to Sipadan.
A storm has recently passed through Borneo and the waters are still turbulent. The waves are punching the speedboat several feet into the air and I’m getting hang time as the boat launches off each of the rollers.
Bad viz lately is the word on the street. No surprise there.
I cross my fingers and whisper a prayer to the ocean gods.
Borneo Divers Resort
Thankfully, Mabul is protected by its own reef and the water surrounding the island is quite calm. We come to a nice, easy stop at the jetty and my sweaty hands pass a few bills to the boat captain.
I’m staying at Borneo Divers Mabul Resort.
Borneo Divers Mabul Resort.
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to witness the underwater beauty of Sipadan, you owe a small thanks to Borneo Divers.
Jacques Cousteau gets all the credit for making Sipadan famous, but the hard work was done by Borneo Divers. The company was founded by Malaysian Clement Lee (one of the dive industry’s most legendary conservationists and a longtime friend of Scuba Travel Ventures) and partners Ron Holland, Randy Davis, and Samson Shak.
Borneo Divers made the first exploratory dives in 1982 and built the island’s first dive resort the following year. At the time, Sipadan’s coral reefs were plagued by local dynamite fishing, which was literally blowing up the island’s coral and fish. The practice ended when Borneo Divers set up shop and established a tourist market.
Their second resort on Mabul is one of the nicest around. Refurbished from 2019 to 2021, with minor improvements still being made, the resort is basically brand-new. The rooms are located on the island while the dive center lies entirely on the jetty, so your lodging is well-separated from the noisy dive boats, air compressors, and dive center hustle-and-bustle.
For years, Borneo Divers had the only dive operation at Sipadan. Everything changed when Jacques Cousteau came to town.
With assistance from Borneo Divers, Cousteau filmed a documentary about the island that spread the word like wildfire. The next decade saw a substantial influx of tourists, dive professionals, and resort staff, and by the early 2000s the island hosted 5 dive resorts.
Sipadan could not carry the weight of unregulated tourism. The coral reefs started to whither.
Borneo Divers made a genuine effort to employ eco-friendly practices at its resort but even the owners acknowledged the degradation of the coral. Marine biologists identified pollution and untreated sewage runoff as the main culprits, and also destruction by careless divers.
But the island was saved by a good twist of fate.
Sipadan had been ungoverned territory for many decades. Neither Malaysia nor Indonesia wanted to be drawn into a contentious border dispute over it so they both avoided making a claim on the island, preferring the status quo of terra nullius.
That changed when Sipadan became famous. The prospect of untapped tourism revenue raised new excitement about the island’s territorial status. Ultimately, both countries agreed to bring the case before the International Court.
In 2002, the court awarded Sipadan to Malaysia, on the basis that Malaysia had a history of occupying the island and also because Sipadan is closer to Malaysian borders.
Now with total authority over the island, the Malaysian government made one of the most stunning and gutsy moves in conservation history: they ordered the 5 dive resorts to pack up, demolish their buildings, and leave Sipadan.
With Malaysia’s economy beginning to flourish, the government realized that tourism promised a bright future. Protecting Borneo’s landscape would be instrumental in developing the country’s ecotourism.
Borneo Divers was ahead of the game. Feeling guilty about the ailing coral and also anticipating such a move by the government, the owners had already started a new dive operation based at Mabul Island, just 15 minutes from Sipadan and with a longer history of human occupation. They were (proudly) the first dive resort to move out.
The government never paid a cent in compensation to the dive resorts. Borneo Divers lost millions, but they handled the transition much more easily than the other dive resorts due to their foresight and well-established brand.
They’ve got no hard feelings about it, either. Healthy reefs are good for business, and the new resort on Mabul is bigger and more luxurious than what they could have built on Sipadan.
After I’ve settled into my room, I walk to the jetty to get my rental gear and do a check dive.
Mohd Fuad is my guide for most of the week. Everyone calls him Scott. You should ask him how he got that nickname — it’s a nice story.
Scott was born in the state capital of Kota Kinabalu in a village called Menggatal. He never dreamed that he’d have one of the luckiest jobs in the world: diving Sipadan week-in and week-out.
When Scott was 17 he took a part-time job at a submarine base in Sabah and assisted the divers that worked on the subs.
“Basically my job is just filling up tanks and setting up their equipment and dive gear,” says Scott.
“The divers that worked there kept telling me I should become a diver by joining this program.”
The program takes local Malaysians with no diving experience and turns them into divemasters. It’s organized by the Sabah government as part of an initiative to get more Malaysians working in the dive industry. Many candidates are interviewed but only 20 are selected for the program.
“I went to the interview. I wait for a few days. Suddenly I got a phone call that they accept me into the training. I got in.”
The training was mostly done by Borneo Divers, which offered Scott a job at their dive center in Kota Kinabalu. After a few months they transferred him to Mabul. He’s on his 9th year with the resort.
Guiding divers at Sipadan is not easy. The diving is deep and the currents are strong, which makes it challenging to look after the divers underwater. On top of that, Scott is responsible for making sure the divers don’t harm marine life.
“We get too many divers who don’t really have good performance,” says Scott.
He abides by the company’s philosophy: At Borneo Divers, we make divers.
They’re not only talking about students and courses. If you demonstrate poor performance when you’re diving, the staff will not hesitate to give you instruction no matter what your certification or experience level.
“The most important thing you need to take care of at Sipadan is your buoyancy,” says Scott. “Nobody wants to see you kicking the corals. Landing on top of the coral reefs and all.”
“If they’re not listening to us, sometimes we have to do something underwater. I’ve seen dive professionals actually hit the diver with the tank banger! Their legs, their head!”
Scott doesn’t do that, but if divers aren’t following his instructions he will issue sharp commands via gestures and hand signals that are quite assertive and even intimidating.
He’s not a mean guy; like most Malaysians, Scott is a chill, pleasant dude who enjoys hanging out with clients at the dive bar. But he’s got an important job to do: protecting the precious marine life at Sipadan. Management encourages the dive professionals to be as strict as required to prevent divers from hurting the animals and coral.
“Here at Borneo Divers, you know we’re a pioneer so we have to take good care of the name. We’re not gonna make ourselves look bad to the world.”
Dive facilities at Borneo Divers.
It can be demanding to work for a company with high standards and a reputation to uphold, but the staff enjoy a few perks. They get a 2-week leave every 2 – 3 months, and enjoy some pretty fantastic accommodations while they’re working on Mabul.
“We have staff quarters — really nice! We got air conditioning. We got ceiling fans. Hot showers. As a dive instructor I get a room to myself.”
Plus, there’s only a short commute.
“Every morning, I just have to wake up and walk from my room to the jetty.”
It’s a 5-minute walk.
Diving at Mabul & Kapalai
Although Sipadan is famous for big animals, your dive trip will mostly consist of critter diving. Oh, the irony!
If you’re staying for 6 nights, you’re only guaranteed 3 days at Sipadan — maybe an extra day, if you’re lucky. That’s the standard for not only Borneo Divers but all resorts approved to dive Sipadan. Furthermore, you’re only allowed 2 dives per day at Sipadan, which means your afternoon and evening dives will be elsewhere.
Most of the time, you’ll be diving at the neighboring islands of Mabul and Kapalai, which are slightly bigger than Sipadan and much shallower.
The house reefs are very sandy, so much of the coral grows on artificial wrecks that litter the coastline.
My check dive is at the Borneo Divers house reef, known as Paradise 2.
In my opinion, the best diving at Mabul is right here: in the sandy house reefs just offshore of the dive resorts, no deeper than 40 – 50 feet. The visibility isn’t so good, but you don’t need it because you’re mostly looking at things that are only a couple feet from your mask — the little creatures hiding in plain sight.
I was not prepared for the awesomeness of the critter diving. Here at Mabul and Kapalai, the biodiversity of the Coral Triangle is on full display, the Dazzle Meter dialed up to 11.
You don’t see it until you see it: the decorator crab hiding in the anemone, the ghost pipefish posing as a feather star, the frogfish camouflaged as coral. Scott keeps pointing at things and it always takes me a moment to figure out exactly what he’s trying to show me.
Huh?
What am I supposed to be looking at?
Oh, wow! Check that out!
It’s an “Easter egg hunt” as my dad likes to say.
It’s not all critters, though. In a moment of good fortune, we stumble upon a school of great barracuda at one of the Mabul house reefs. You typically only find these at Sipadan so everyone including the guides are shocked.
A school of yellowtail snappers at Stingray City.
Eventually the islands drop down to 70 – 80 feet, creating some beautiful sloping reefs with the highest density of coral.
A pair of green sea turtles at Stingray City.
One of these sloping reefs is a dive site called Stingray City. Of all the dive sites I visit, this one feels the most like Classic Southeast Asia with blue-spotted stingrays and schools of snapper, the comfort foods of Southeast Asian diving.
Keep swimming across the channel and you’ll hit the “second reef.” There’s not much in the way of coral, but this is the place to go if you love nudibranchs and invertebrates.
My favorite dive site is the aptly-named Eel Garden. We drop down to 70 feet and check out a suburb of garden eels before cruising up the slope to search for other critters; we find about 5 different species of eel. I’ve gone diving at Sipadan, by this point, but it feels so nice to end my trip with a great macro dive.
Even if Sipadan didn’t exist, Mabul and Kapalai would still make a worthwhile dive trip for those who appreciate critter diving, and especially for underwater photographers.
My video lights are just strong enough to draw the attention of a curious cuttlefish, but unfortunately I don’t have the strobe lights or macro lens to capture great close-ups.
But I do my best.
Borneo Divers prefers not to schedule Sipadan on the first day of diving. They want you to dive Mabul and Kapalai first so they can feel out your diving skills and build anticipation for Sipadan.
I like that strategy.
The critter diving is a whole lot of fun and lets you soak in the Coral Triangle’s biodiversity before you go looking for bigger animals at Sipadan. It’s the perfect appetizer for the main course.
Diving at Sipadan
It’s on the whiteboard now:
Sipadan.
My name is written there. Boat leaves at 6 AM.
The staff reminds us to bring our certification cards. Only advanced divers are permitted to dive Sipadan, and most dive resorts prefer that you’ve logged about 50 dives.
The ocean gods must have taken pity on me because the surf has mellowed out considerably since day one and we enjoy a nice, smooth crossing from Mabul.
As we zip across the passage, the turquoise water turns dark blue.
Sipadan is Malaysia’s only oceanic island. It’s a seamount formed over thousands of years as coral stacked up on the peak of an ancient underwater volcano. Its location in the open ocean draws millions of pelagic fish, including schools of jack, barracuda, and hammerhead sharks, and whale sharks pass through in March and April. In the winter, the colder water brings even more species of shark, like thresher and zebra sharks.
We get our first glimpse of the little island as the dive boat powers down and gently comes to a rest on the beach.
Sabah Parks manages the island and only grants 120 visitation permits per day. The permits are allocated to each of the resorts approved to dive Sipadan, and are doled out among diving and snorkeling groups.
The small dive shops get fewer permits while the big resorts get more permits.
The small dive shops are only allowed to dive in the afternoon. The big resorts get to come in the morning.
On the surface interval, divers can lunch at the picnic area and use the well-maintained restrooms.
We step onto the island and walk over to a wooden lodge where a park ranger sits on the porch. One by one, we show him our certification cards and he makes sure they match our passport information on file. When everyone’s been verified, he gives the crew a special flag to display on the boat that lets the dive marshals know we’ve been cleared for diving.
The dive marshals patrol the island in a police boat. They’ll randomly check in on dive groups and take underwater photos of the divers. If they catch you making flagrant violations — such as kicking coral — they’ll bring you to the lodge after the dive and confront you with the evidence of your crimes. They’re authorized to fine you as much as $650 for serious and repeat offenses.
“They’re getting some of the dive centers from Semporna,” says Scott. “There’s a lot of dive centers over there. For us big resorts, they don’t really follow us. They know our standards.”
I test my camera as we gear up for the first dive. Scott knows I enjoy taking photos of the reef.
“Don’t stop to take pictures of the coral or little fish,” he tells our group — but mostly me.
“We’re looking for the big stuff. That’s why you came here.”
Our first dive is at Sipadan’s most famous dive site: Barracuda Point.
I’m blown away by the size of Sipadan’s walls. She’s an iceberg of an island, very small on top but gargantuan beneath the water.
She’s got a shallow, inner reef that starts at the beach and meanders a couple hundred yards off-shore.
Then the reef buckles, kneeling down to 30 feet, and — like an Olympic diver leaping from a platform — makes a sudden and death-defying plunge into the depths of the ocean, thousands of feet straight-down.
The first 10 minutes are sensory overload. I’m not sure where to look. At the gleaming coral in the shallows? The big blue void of the open ocean? The shadowy depths of the drop-off? There’s a lot to process.
True to its name, there’s a school of great barracuda on the horizon, but we don’t get much of a look at it before we’re swept up by the current and enter a drift dive.
We drift right into a school of humphead parrotfish. They’re really big fish and lounge above the coral like a herd of grazing cows.
As we round the corner of the reef we drift over a school of jackfish. We’ve only been diving for 30 minutes and we’ve already encountered schools of barracuda, humphead parrotfish, and now jackfish.
That’s why this dive site is famous.
A whitetip reef shark at Barracuda Point.
“Everyone likes Barracuda Point,” says Scott. “You got a little bit of everything out there. There’s wall dives. There’s current. There’s lots and lots of beautiful corals, too.”
Oh, the coral.
The walls at Sipadan are fortified top-to-bottom by coral. From a distance, it’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at hard coral or soft coral, this species or that species. The entire wall is a lush, sweeping coral garden. It seems like every patch of coral has at least 5 different species.
Although Scott told me not to prioritize the coral, I have a difficult time prying my eyes from the textures, colors, and enormity of the reef. I bemoan the fact that I don’t have lights strong enough to snap a good reefscape.
The east and west sides of the island have the most spectacular coral walls, especially the dive sites Coral Gardens and Hanging Gardens. Exactly as they sound.
I get two days of diving at Sipadan and on both days South Point gives us the luckiest hand.
“At the end of South Point you’re gonna see all these soft and hard corals and there’s a lot of turtles out there,” says Scott. “South Point is popular with sharks, as well.”
At South Point we encounter an enormous school of jackfish — the quintessence of Sipadan diving.
We also go looking for hammerheads.
Scott and his co-workers pride themselves on their “hammerhead hunting.” They look for the lone hammerhead shark that’s scouting the edge of the reef, and when they spot one they follow it out to sea. If they keep a good pace, the scout will lead them right to the school.
In probably the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve done as a scuba diver, we kick away from the island and swim out to the deep blue, with thousands of feet of who knows what beneath us. This is probably the closest I’ll come to a spacewalk. It’s a rad detour, even though we don’t find the hammerheads.
Sipadan gives me a newfound appreciation for two animals.
First, there’s the whitetip reef shark.
I’m more of a blacktip kind of guy, but I like how the whitetips lie down on the corners of the island, where the current runs strong and fast. When they sense prey nearby they lift off like Apache helicopters and take flight in the underwater jet stream.
Second is the sea turtle.
On my dive adventures, I had started getting bored of sea turtles because they really don’t do much of anything; they’re the stoners of the ocean, as my brother likes to say. Sleeping, chewing grass, and looking rather lazy.
It’s tough for a sea turtle cynic to admit, but… the Sipadan turtles are pretty rad.
Sea turtles use the island as a mating and nesting ground, so naturally they’re everywhere at Sipadan. It’s not uncommon to spot between 20 – 30 turtles on a single dive. Look up, look down, look around — there’s probably at least one sea turtle in your line of sight at all times.
The island has small, juvenile turtles and also the largest sea turtles I’ve ever seen, weighing at least 1,000 pounds and easily the biggest permanent residents of Sipadan. Really they’re more like boulders than turtles, and it’s amazing they’re strong enough to lift themselves off the coral.
And these turtles ‘ain’t shy. They let divers get pretty close to them, and sometimes they get pretty close to you — a big one comes straight at me, like it’s going to snag my BCD and drag me down into the abyss. My life flashes before my eyes; I never thought I’d die in the cold, murderous beak of a sea turtle.
Turtle Patch is a shallow dive site where the juvenile turtles hang out.
On a dive anywhere else in the world, each diver would line up and wait their turn to snap a photo of the sea turtle. We don’t have to do that at Turtle Patch because there’s enough sea turtles here for everyone in our group. You get a sea turtle! You get a sea turtle! Everybody gets a sea turtle! There’s plenty of sea turtles to go around.
It’s a fun time underwater. I keep a respectful distance and use my camera zoom to snap a few pics.
When the day’s diving is done, Scott looks as happy as his divers.
“We dive almost every day at Mabul and Sipadan, right? 9 years working as a dive professional — I still got that excitement in me.
“It’s not just the guests that want to see this stuff at Sipadan. I also want to see this stuff!”
The Adventure
“I have seen other places like Sipadan, 45 years ago, but now no more.”
— Jacques Cousteau
Strangely, I find that stepping onto Sipadan Island is the most thrilling part about diving Sipadan.
There’s nothing on Sipadan except for a small lodge, a bathroom, and a picnic area where divers have lunch. Somewhere on the backside is a military outpost that guards Sipadan and its divers. That’s about it, though. With the dive resorts gone, you get the sense that nature has reclaimed its place as the island’s rightful ruler.
Pulau Sipadan gets few daily visitors; you’re a lucky person if you’re able to come here. I can’t help but feel a rush of giddy excitement as my feet hit the sand.
The surface interval affords me the best opportunity to breathe-in the island. We’re not allowed to explore or go swimming, so after we eat and have our coffee we find ourselves a place to stretch out under the shade of palm trees.
Lying on this sand, which is cushioned by coral, that’s lifted by an old volcano sinking thousands of feet to the seafloor, I almost have the feeling that the ocean is cradling me. It’s a simple feeling and a pleasant feeling.
Scott feels lucky to have spent so much time on this beach and logged so many dives at Sipadan. Even so, he’s spent nearly his entire career at Mabul and he’s just about ready for a change.
“I’m gonna stay here exactly 10 years — that’s next year,” says Scott. “I want to try and work in Indonesia as a dive instructor, and I want to work in Malaysia Peninsula as well, mostly on Tioman.”
Sipadan has changed him. When Scott first started working at Borneo Divers, he felt a great deal of pride at getting paid to dive one of the world’s most celebrated dive sites.
“But year by year,” he says, “I started thinking about conservation things.”
Nowadays, Scott gets special satisfaction from activities like underwater cleanup, coral restoration, coral planting, and local education; Borneo Divers organizes a program that teaches Mabul’s local children the importance of picking up trash and taking care of the island.
Still, Sipadan faces challenges.
All the staff I speak with tell me they’ve noticed a small decline in the density of fish and health of the coral, a change that’s been slow but noticeable over the last 10 years.
It’s hard to imagine Sipadan being any more amazing than it already is, but the staff swear by it.
“The reef was a little nicer back then,” says Scott. “People talk about global warming, stuff like that. Sometimes the coral gets destroyed by divers, as well. I’ve seen that in front of my eyes. It’s really devastating.”
While climate change poses the most severe threat, careless diving is probably the most significant daily threat to Sipadan.
“Here’s the thing about divers,” says Scott. “Sometimes they just don’t listen to you even though you keep telling them not to do that, not to do this.”
Scott says there are some dive centers that visit Sipadan which don’t have the same standards as Borneo Divers, and they don’t do enough to keep their divers from harassing animals or bumping into the reef.
Thankfully, there’s some good news.
Scott says the reefs are in better shape after the Covid pandemic, when the island enjoyed 2 years without divers or snorkelers. Beginning this year, Sipadan will be closed every November to give the island a similar, if shorter recovery time.
Sabah Parks also tightened the rules after the pandemic. Now they only allow 2 dives per permit instead of 3, reducing the overall number of dives by a third. They also banned training dives on the island.
Furthermore, the Malaysian government, PADI, and the Borneo tourism industry is lobbying to have Sipadan classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which would provide more funding to protect and restore the island.
The hope is that the annual closure and new regulations will make the diving more sustainable and keep the coral in good shape.
Although careless divers can be tiresome, Scott doesn’t feel any sort of fatigue about the diving itself, even after all these years.
“If there’s a school of sharks over there or a school of barracuda in front of me… I’m like, from inside my regulator, woo-hoo!
“You’re surrounded by fish, you swim with sharks… I still feel that!
“I still got that excitement.”
Due to the limited number of permits, it can be tough to book a group trip to Sipadan. Contact Scuba Travel Ventures and we’ll make sure your group gets all the rooms and dive permits you need to have an unforgettable adventure.