On the first week of 2019 Ves and I spent 5 days on board the Seaventures dive rig to finally experience the bucket list dive destination, Sipadan. As Malaysia’s only oceanic island, Pulau Sipadan is famous for healthy corals, sightings of pelagics such as hammerhead sharks, schools of jack fish and bumphead parrotfish, and the world famous barracuda “tornado”. Unfortunately for us, perhaps due to the weather, we only experienced one or two of those things in our one day at Sipadan.
Where is it?
Pulau Sipadan, or Sipadan island, is located south of Semporna town, at the east of Borneo Malaysia. The nearest resorts to Sipadan are located at Kapalai and Mabul islands, which is also where the Seaventures dive rig is located.
The rig
Seaventures is known for its unique resort – that of a converted oil rig in the middle of the ocean. With Seaventures, you get the “liveaboard” feeling without any of the crowding or rocking in the waves (great for people who get seasick easily!).
In my short stay of 5d4n there, I have to say that the facilities are really good. The accomodations are sparsely furnished but all the essentials are there – 24/7 power, air conditioning, fresh(ish) water and comfy beds. It’s not much to look at, but who cares? You’re there for the diving not for the room.
The resort offers full-board accommodation, with all meals covered in the price. These meals come in the form of buffet spreads, except for meals during dive times, which are brought along on the boat.
Service & Equipment
Overall the Seaventures staff and DMs were all very pleasant and professional people, with the exception of the customer service staff that you liaise with to book your stay. During the initial email communications, the sales staff came across as very rude and arrogant. Yes, we know Seaventures is a world-famous destination, and they behave as though they are able to pick and choose their customers, which frankly speaking is really not the goal of sales. The sales staff really soured the impression of the place before we even got there.
Since not everyone from our group had a full dive kit, some of us had to rent our equipment, myself included. The regulator that I rented was really difficult to breathe with, and it was the same as well for Ves and a couple more from my group. The rest of the dive equipment were also of similar quality. You can dive with it, but it doesn’t feel nice to do so. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you would have no problems surviving a dive with their kit. I would recommend everyone to bring or even purchase their own equipment, as the rental at the resort isn’t cheap and the quality isn’t that good either.
The diving
Right off the bat, I’ll just say that the end of the year is really not the right time to go to Sipadan island and its surrounding areas (Mabul, Kapalai etc). Besides the usual peak holiday season crowd that you’ll see on almost every dive site (with North hemisphere people escaping the winter) it’s also the monsoon season, which means rainy days and lower-visibility water. Despite the assurances that Sipadan is a year-round dive destination, we found plenty of evidence to the contrary and had pretty bad visibility (by local standards) on all of our dives (about 8-10m). I would share more photos with you, but many of them have subjects hidden behind a cloud of sediment, plankton and other marine detriment.
Expecting to see plenty of sharks, pelagics and huge schools of fish, what we saw on our trip instead was one school of bumphead parrotfish, one or two blacktip sharks, a few turtles and other small critters which are interesting on their own but not really what people go to Sipadan for. It is by no means bad diving, but it didn’t really live up to the standards of what we expected.
The house reef
Seaventure’s house reef has been raved as well by many people, but perhaps due to the season and low visibility, it was really nice to dive, but not as amazing as I expected from the reviews I have read. Again, it could be due to the visibility of the monsoon season. That said, we did manage to see some beautiful nudibranch, flatworms, blue spotted stingrays, the massive resident moray eel and grouper, and even (very luckily!) a flamboyant cuttlefish in one of our dawn dives. Unfortunately I only have a GoPro so I could not capture it in the limited light of dawn.
However, since Seaventures offers unlimited diving in its house reef, there’s really no reason not to do it. At minimum the resort requires you to dive with at least one other person, but it’s always easy to find a group or buddy to follow along. You can of course ask a DM to guide you along each time, but it’s not really required because there aren’t really drop-offs and you can pretty much always see the 5 pillars of the rig in the water most of the time. The only real dangers is that there might be some strong currents especially near the surface, and that you might forget to check your air consumption. Also, another important point that you should take note is that multiple repeated dives will reduce your NDL times at depth, which means that your later guided dives might be limited in depth due to the high nitrogen loading from too many house reef dives. We found that within a day, it was possible to do 5-7 dives (3 guided, and 2-4 house reef) if you wake up early for a dawn dive and go for 1-2 more dives in the afternoon and 1 more in the evening.
How to get there
The nearest airport to Sipadan (and Seaventures) is Tawau international airport. If you are taking a package with Seaventures, they are able to organize a pickup from the airport directly to the resort, though we did not go for that option. Instead, due to the flight timings, we found it much more cost-efficient to stay one night in Semporna before going over to Seaventures the next day. This was a custom arrangement, where Seaventures would pick us from the airport, send us to our temporary accommodation in Semporna, and then pick us up again the next day (and we had to pay extra for it). As long as you are staying at Seaventures, they would help you with the transport arrangements – the only thing you need to worry about is your flight to Tawau.
So is it worth it?
To be honest, I’m not really sure. The dive rig was a really comfortable place to stay in, but the equipment we rented were in pretty bad shape, and the price isn’t very cheap compared to other Southeast Asian dive destinations. However, I believe my opinion also came from the fact that we went during the monsoon season and couldn’t see the things we wanted to see. So I guess it could very much be worth it if you go during the right season. I will probably give this place a chance again in the future when I save up more money .
That said, I’m not looking forward to dealing with their sales staff. They really should hire new ones. I just feel angry thinking about their arrogance.
