Visiting Sabah (Part 1)
FiNS Contributor Alex Mustard recently visited Sabah, Malaysia, and sent us some thoughts from his trip. Read further for the first of three installments about his recent Sabah sojourn:
I’m sure that most of you wouldn’t need an excuse to visit Sabah, but this year Malaysia celebrates 50 years of nationhood, which provides the perfect reason to head out to the terrific trio of Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai for some quality diving.
These islands, off the east coast of Sabah, really provide a wonderful chance to sample the best of three worlds. Sipadan gives us tremendous big animal diving, dramatic walls and lush coral gardens, while Kapalai and Mabul are the perfect foil as two distinct critter capitols.
For the first part of my trip, I stayed at the elegant and effortlessly efficient Kapalai Dive Resort. For most of the first week, I dived with a great bunch of visitors from Singapore: Lawrence, Linda, Frances, Chris, Seng, Phoebe and Cheryl, who were not only fantastic fun both above and below the waves, but were also keen photographers who took some excellent photos too…well, apart from Seng!
Sipadan diving was as exciting as ever. We were lucky enough to dive with schools of bumphead parrotfish on this trip, having great encounters on most days. As usual, green turtles were abundant, seemingly stuffed into every crevice on the reef.
One turtle we saw hung precariously on a vertical wall with just its front flipper tucked over a wire coral. Pleasingly, whitetip reef sharks seem more abundant than I remembered from previous trips, and our group saw grey reefs sharks, a lone hammerhead, and several leopard sharks too.
On the macro front, it was certainly frogfish season, with lots of giant frogfish in residence at both Kapalai and Mabul. I spotted them in yellow, blue, brown, green, grey and black…all posed willingly for the camera. And beautifully coloured ghost pipefish were another common macro highlight during my trip.
Check back soon for the next installment of Alex’s trip notes.