Sipadan, Malaisie, du 9 au 25 août 2018

Three days trip to Semporna, on the east coast of Sabah, on the island of Borneo, via Kuala Lumpur and Tawau.

The island of Sipadan is at 1 hour 30 mn speed boat (60 km) from Semporna. An island lost in the Indian Ocean, the Sea of Celebes. It’s a little-known place, a marine turtle sanctuary.

33 dives from 9 to 25 August 2018 at the end of the world… if there is an underwater paradise, one should not be far away.

Sipadan is explored by Commander Cousteau with the Calapyso in 1988. Very impressed, he would have said «It is an intact art-work».

A dream for any divers, an incredible diversity and abundance of marine fauna, walls of swirling barracudas, multitudes of turtles, thousands of silver fish, schools of big-eyed jacks, sharks, corals, bumphead parrotfishes and more.

The regulations are strict on Sipadan. The island is guarded by the army with an imposed curfew after 18.00 on the whole marine region. It is impossible to sleep on Sipadan, the only solution is to return to Semporna or to stay on the nearby touristic island of Mabul, at 25 km. Registration is mandatory for each person who disembarks to limit the number of visitors to 120 divers per day, designed to preserve the eco-system.

After 21 consecutive dives on Sipadan, our guide invites us to visit «Turtle Tomb». In 1989 Cousteau made a documentary entitled «The Tortle spectre». It presents extraordinary images of the cave housing a cemetery of turtles with whitish skulls and shells on sandy ground. Lost in the guts of the cave, they would have died, asphyxiated, because they could not find the exit to return to the surface.

Phoctopus returns to the Commandant Cousteau’s footsteps with an immersion of 45 minutes, at 25 meters of depth, in absolute darkness. The progression is done very methodically with the guide and the only sound signals, without any Ariane thread. Only our lamps allow us to understand that we are alone in the middle of nowhere, the images are made at 6000 ISO, they become unique and spectacular.