Borneo 2003
The glaring white sand
was so hot underfoot, it forced me to hop from foot to foot on the beach. The
inviting wash of cool water was just a few skips away, but I hesitated. The
last time I had put my feet in the sea had been in England, Babbacombe bay, in
early April that year, and the shock of that water (11 degrees C) had been
enough seemingly to bring on a heart attack. Then, I had been required to take
that dip, in order to complete my ‘open water’ scuba diving training. My wife
Maggie had spent many months in a swimming pool laboriously learning the skills
that I had picked up in moments, as if I were born with a breathing regulator
in my mouth. But now it had been me, who, at the first shock of the icy
‘I can’t do this!’
Standing in the shallows, Maggie had urged
“Come on, it’s not that cold!” and I took the plunge, wading into the cruel
cold English channel with gritted teeth and shivering limbs. That day, only the
two of us passed. One by one the other trainees succumbed to the numbing cold
and trailed away seeking hot chocolate. We were determined to swim with turtles
however, and somehow held on in there.
Now, on that hot tropical beach, my wife used the same words again. She was
already in the water. Once again I held my breath, and stepped into the
water....I looked up into my wife’s grinning, mischievous face. The water was
incredibly warm (30 degrees C). Even the sand over which the waves washed was
warm. I realised that I was going to like this.
After a chaotic and
endless minibus journey across the wilds of
We were there to dive
with turtles. That first afternoon however, we were too late arriving to be
given a ‘check dive’ by the dive guide, who with good reason eyed our paltry
number of sea dives to date with some suspicion. Getting it wrong when the
quarry bottom is 5m down is one thing, getting it wrong when there is nothing
but deep blue sea under you for 600m is something else. So we were to go
snorkelling.
Sliding down into the
warm water, the snorkel in my mouth seemed incredibly light and insubstantial
after the security of a diving regulator, and swimming in a T-Shirt was just
WRONG, however, after a few seconds the strangeness faded, and checking that my
wife Maggie was with me, we began finning lazily out to the reef edge, and our
first sight of that spectacular underwater drop-off point. Two clear markers
indicated its location- the sudden darkening of the water, and a thick band of
fish stretching out of sight in both directions, in one long strip, like some
alien undersea highway. I approached the sheer edge of the reef cautiously,
amazed at the fantastic riot of soft and hard corals which grew in such
profusion there, all imperceptibly struggling to get their fair share of the
sunlight which streaked down through the warm clear water. A spectacular
underwater jungle, heavily populated with the small forms of flitting and
zipping fish.
Suddenly, the fish
over the reef parted, revealing a single dark passage out to sea, through which
slowly cruised the lean grey shape of a reef shark. It rolled one eye at me,
clearly aware of my presence. At over six feet long, the creature appeared
huge, the slow side to side sweep of his tail exuding the confidence of a lean
mean predator on his home turf. I glanced behind and to one side, to check the
location of my wife. Wide eyes inside a diving mask stared back at me. Back to
the shark. We were on an intersection course. I spread my arms wide, halting my
forward progress, and held my breath. At the same moment, with a twist of his
body, the shark adjusted his course, and slid away from our presence, following
the reef down into the deep blue depths. I turned and gave the OK signal to
Maggie. She grinned and enthusiastically OK’ed back. I was relieved. Persuading
a nervous wife out on such an adventurous holiday, just the third foreign
holiday of our lives (and our first diving holiday ever), was enough of a deal,
without the appearance of a shark coming within metres of us as soon as we
stepped into the water. For me, I had read up on this possible Sipadan encounter,
and I knew that the white tipped reef shark was totally harmless. It was nice
however, to see theory proven in practice. We appeared to that shark to be a
bigger and bulkier predator than him, and discretion ruled the day.
The dive briefing that
night did not go well. Only qualified to dive to 18m, we discovered that most
dives would begin at nearly twice that depth, only moving up to 18m and less
after several minutes. My wife was naturally perturbed by this news, and my
persuasive arguments about there being little difference between 18m in UK
waters, at the bottom of a freezing, dark quarry, and 25m in the clear, bright
warm waters of Sipidan did not convince her. She was worried, and likely to
forgo the dives. Later, gloomily, I supped my cold Guinness (yes, Guinness!),
as the tropical night fell swiftly, and looked out upon the water, watching the
ghostly underwater lights of a party of divers as they worked along the
drop-off on a night dive. Much later, in the steamy heat of the tropical night,
under a whirling ceiling fan, I slept fitfully.
Humiliatingly, the
next morning, we knelt in 3m of water, on the sandy shelf of the reef, and
executed simple safety routines in front of the Dive master (lost regulator,
flooded mask, basic buoyancy). I silently cursed my wife for painting such a
bleak picture of our competency. Everyone else had gone on ahead in the dive
boat to begin their Sipadan adventures. We were still in Kindergarten.
Eventually satisfied, the dive Master allowed us to lift off the bottom, and
fin slowly over the dramatic drop-off, where 5m under us suddenly became 600m
of gloomy dark ocean depths. I drifted down to the planned dive depth of 10m
and looked up. Maggie, accompanied by the Dive Master was still at 4m or so. I
watched them, drifting lazily in the water, as Maggie went through what I now
know to be her familiar first-dive-of-the-holiday ‘can’t get down’ routine.
Suddenly, the Dive
Master made a hand signal in my direction. I could not understand what he was
indicating, and began to fin towards them. Maggie also gestured- she was
pointing below me. I glanced down. Lit by the gleaming shafts of light
streaming down from the ever shifting surface, an adult Hawksbill turtle was
rising from the stygian depths.
I spread myself star
shaped, pausing all movement, and hardly daring to breathe through the noisy,
bubbling regulator, I drank in the moment. Her huge teardrop shaped shell was
iridescent with coloured patterns which flickered and danced in the rippling
sunlight pouring down from above. Rear feet tucked in, front fins spread wide
the enormous turtle sculled lazily upwards and towards us, the slight movement
of those front legs enough to propel her bulk effortlessly through the water.
She slid up between us, and then hovered just below the surface, demonstrating
perfect buoyancy, before gently raising her head on its long neck to
momentarily kiss the surface for a breath. She then drifted for a moment,
allowing her front to dip downwards, before spreading those huge finned legs
once again, and with slow motion
strokes, moved effortlessly away from us, back down into the depths. I watched
until she faded from sight, and then looked up to my wife. She gave the ‘OK’
signal. I numbly reciprocated. One thing was for sure, I decided. You don’t see
many of those at the bottom of a flooded Leicestershire quarry!
We passed our
inspection by the dive master. Despite our lack of sea diving, we had spent
many hours in the gloomy cold waters of various quarry dive sites, after
passing our ‘open water’, where we had undertaken the additional and fairly
rigorous ‘peak performance buoyancy’ practical exam. This specifically trains a
diver for ‘bottomless’ diving. Knowing our holiday destination we had
considered it essential. Now, hanging effortlessly in the water, 10m down and
10m from the vertical reef (with 590m of water below), calm and collected, our
buoyancy steady, watching that turtle, it was clear that we were not going to be a liability for anyone.
The trip to Sipadan
was just a few days of ‘bolted on diving’ to a fortnight’s jungle holiday on
Borneo. We did no more than a dozen dives there, including a spectacular night
dive along that vertical coral reef. Sipadan is one of the best dive
destinations in the world if you wish to see turtles. I have been on diving
holidays when you saw a turtle nearly every dive. Off Sipadan, turtles are
rarely out of sight at any one moment of every dive. There is so much else to
see there from sharks to seaslugs and seahorses, that you almost become blasé
to their presence. I carried a little compact 35mm underwater camera with me,
and found I had always used up the film before the end of the dive.
As you can imagine,
there was not a lot to do at night on Sipadan.
After the equatorial sun had dipped suddenly below the horizon, not long
after 6.00pm, the evenings were long and quiet.
One attraction however was to slip a park
ranger $5 to be guided out along the beach and around the island. Walking on
the beach at night alone was not permitted. The object was to see turtles
coming ashore to lay their eggs. Guarded by the park rangers, these turtles had
their eggs collected, and incubated behind predator proof wire. Technology mad,
I was equipped with the very latest night vision equipment, which I hoped would
obtain night pictures of laying turtles, without disturbing them with
torchlight. This consisted of a ‘Night Owl’ low light image intensifier lens
fitted to my SLR camera, and infra red lenses attached to our Maglight torches.
The result of all this would be to illuminate the scene invisibly with
infra-red using the torches, whilst being able to see this illuminated scene
through the camera’s lens (and subsequently to photograph it). Through the
green haze of this lens, I could see the female turtles swimming up and down
the shallows, ghostly shadows beyond the gentle surf. The hope was that one
would come ashore, and once concerned with egg laying, it could be approached
for some disturbance proof image intensified photography. We walked all the way
around the island (not much of a boast), but, disappointingly, only came across
one digging female, who clearly needed more privacy. Despite keeping our
distance, after a while she abandoned her nesting efforts, and slid back into
the sea.
Coming to the end of
our last dive on Sipadan, I floated reluctantly up and away from yet another
photo opportunity with an obliging turtle. I blew my buoyancy jacket as I
reached the surface, turning it into a lifejacket, and as it tightened around
my chest, I literally gave out a sob of disappointment at having to leave. I
vowed to return for a longer period. I deserved it. Sipadan deserved it. As
always however, ‘going back’ is not always recommended. We did return to the
area in 2005, but not to Sipadan. That patrol vessel off Sipadan in 2003 was in
response to an incident a few years earlier when tourists had been kidnapped from the island
by Indonesian rebels. By 2005, the dark clouds of terrorism and the ransoming
of western tourists were growing industries in the seas off Borneo and
Indonesia. The isolated Sipadan island was abandoned, except for its ranger
station, and all those wonderful log cabins nestling in between the palm trees
were dismantled, and removed. The sea around the island had been made a marine
park reserve, with dives limited to mornings only, travelling from the much
larger and permanently inhabited island of Mabul. There we stayed, in a
spectacular water village, newly built and achingly beautiful. It was however,
not the same, and even though my camera equipment had been upgraded to digital
video from that little snap camera, it is those first grainy pictures taken by
the little point and shoot which still have the power to take me back in an
instant to that hot beach, and those turtle rich seas.