| 2005/09/21 Sipadan - Kapalai | |
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2005-09-21 23:42
by Merlin
in Diving, Trips
After visiting the Orang Outang in Sepilok, I took a 30mn flight South to Tawau, and a boat transfert to the water village of Kapalai.
Technically there is a island there, but practically, it is under water more than half the time due to damage made by fishermen that were doing dynamite fishing before it was both forbidden and strictly enforced (hence the small contingent of army in that village too) There is the small price to pay of getting up at 04:50 for the 05:30 boat departure to the Island of Sipadan and its reefs, but the diving is spectacular: I get 3 dives by noon, and another one or two in the afternoon (watching my dive computer carefully to make sure I don't accumulate too much nitrogen in my body)
On my first full day, I got to see giant turtles (more than 1 metre), some eating, some swimming, and some sleeping, fish that look like remnants of dinosaurs, and fish you can barely recognize, even on the picture (like leaf fish, or rock fish). I also got to see a huge school of giant parrot fish: those were more than 1 metre long too, and they were many, quite impressive. The interesting part is that they actually eat rock, process whatever there is to eat inside, and actually shit sand, metric tons of it, and that sand is responsible for the nearby Islands still being there... I finished the day with a night dive, which is always fun as fish sleep against rock or the bottom, with their eyes opened (no eyelids), and eventually wake up if you shine light in their eyes :) Oh, and just to make things interesting, I also had to rescue my server from a, slashdotting that hit the machine pretty hard due to overforking from Rig. All in a day's work :) Here are a few excerpts from my dive pictures and videos (as I get the chance/bandwidth to upload them). Try the BestOf dir for highlights
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