Dive! Dive! Dive!

Yvon found Nemo

Today was a full (and full-on) diving day. The Sipadan divers start at the crack of dawn but for the rest of us, it's the respectable hour of 9am. After breakfast we headed down the jetty to find that Island Time also operates on Mabul, so we went snorkelling for a while. It was such a nice site that when I found out that's where they do the night dives, I booked on straight away. Lucky, because it was full not long after (they only have 5 torches. And one night diving timeslot.) Our first dive was at Kapalai House Reef, which was fabulous. No flamboyant cuttlefish anymore though :( They can't find them much anymore apparently, I must have been really lucky last time to see him on every dive on the house reef. We saw lots of critters and some turtles, and beautiful white anemones with clownfish.

White anemones

The second dive was at Lobster Wall again, and it was very nice. Lots of turtles everywhere. Our dive guide today was Jo, she was so friendly and helpful and really made up for yesterday.

Tagged turtle

We had lunch and a camera battery change and then back to the jetty for dive 3 - the most ridiculous shore dive I have ever seen. We all got on the boat ready to go, then they said "ok do a backward roll" and we said yes we've been doing them for 2 days, and she said "no, now. This is our dive site." So we did a roll off the boat, at the jetty.... we did drift along quite a ways past Borneo Divers and the boat picked us up, so I suppose it counts as a boat dive. We saw a tagged turtle, number 473-Z, and from what I can tell at the Sea Turtle Tag Inventory site, he came from Hawaii! Hard to tell since I guess his Lei fell off somewhere in the Pacific. Quite a journey for a little turtle though, I wonder if I've read the database correctly?

After dive 3 there was time for a bit of tea and cake, a quick break and before I knew it, it was 6pm already and time for the night dive. Rich was our guide, and there were four of us. Rich was so laid back I thought he was going to fall asleep, very nice and a great guide, but the way he talks just made me laugh, he sounded just like Ozzy Osborne but chilled. "Yeah man, it's just going to be a really chilled dive, man..." And it was a great dive, 75 minutes in clear water. I saw an enormous turtle asleep with his head in a hole. When I showed Yvon the photo she said "are you sure he was asleep?" I said yes pretty sure, he didn't react to us being there. She suggested maybe he was playing hide and seek, and I pointed out that he wasn't hiding very well. "Oh no," she said, "he was counting! Did you see any other turtles?" I said no. "See! They were hiding!"