A tale of two reefs

The island of Sipadan is famous for big animals, big walls and big visibility. So why is its neighbour, Mabul, so different? Simon Rogerson reports. Photographs by Matthew Oldfield...

Photo: Matthew Oldfield Photo: Matthew Oldfield Photo: Matthew Oldfield Photo: Matthew Oldfield

Under the oil rig it was raining sideways. The patterns of the current had become visible, millions of drifting plankton threads illuminated by the afternoon sun. Steeling myself against the current, I finned towards the bottom, where the rig’s support beams plunged into the sand like four gigantic elephant legs. Here the sea bed was strewn with cables, rubble, and the twisted remains of a hydraulic platform. It was a scene from a scrap yard, but there were fish everywhere. After all, a busy reef doesn’t necessarily have to be a vision of paradise.

A mass of yellow sweepers shifted in and out of a tangled pile of copper wiring, while a crocodilefish stalked a bumbling group of catfish. Stranger still were the four giant frogfish that stood sentry on opposing corners of a rusting metal box the size of a boxing ring. Two of the football-sized frogfish were bright orange, while the other two were a velvety black, speckled with sand particles. This oil rig has been converted into an offshore dive centre and is moored just off Mabul island, northwest Borneo, in a bid to attract divers. When I was staying on Mabul itself, the kindest remark about the rusting hulk lurking a few hundred metres offshore was that it would make a passable wreck dive if they sank it – it ruins the view (from the island), but at least it provides an unusual dive site.

Mabul is a small, oval island perched on the corner of a large reef. It lies on a continental shelf, where the visibility is limited and large animals are seldom seen. Just a 20-minute boat ride away is Malaysia’s only oceanic island, Pulau Sipadan, where precipitous reef walls plunge 600m into the sea, and where incredible numbers of green and hawksbill turtles still gather to mate and nest. Here, the water is often (but by no means always) a perfect blue, with 30m visibility. Herds of 1.5m-long bumphead parrotfish cruise the reef, while pulsating schools of bigeye trevally and chevron barracuda patrol the drop-off. Sipadan represents diving at its most obviously beautiful: a flamboyant display of colour, predation and copulation. At first glance, Mabul looks like a poor relation, but this is a place where first glances don’t get you very far. It is sufficiently distanced from the freshwater run-off of the mainland for coral to flourish, but a period of dynamite fishing that lasted into the mid-Nineties destroyed large sections of Mabul’s reef. The reef has now taken on a sort of afterlife. Gone are the big jacks, tuna and sharks – instead, there is a profusion of bottom-dwelling fish and invertebrates that live without the overt pressure of predators that are associated with places such as Sipadan.

My first dive at Mabul was a revelation. I didn’t see a single lump of coral, but followed a sandy slope that dropped away gradually from the dive centre’s dock. Immediately I was greeted by a giant cuttlefish which blushed bright red as I descended. The sun was so bright, I was practically blinded by the reflections of surface ripples on the white sand. A black-and-white snake eel was out of its hole, hunting for a mid-morning snack. Gobies retreated into their dens as it passed. A flying gurnard glided by, taking in the scene with bulbous, orange eyes. Dive guides from Mabul’s popular resort, Sipadan Water Village, have given nature a helping hand on this site, known locally as ‘Paradise One’. Dead palm trees have been suspended from buoys, providing an ideal place for bigfin reef squid to hang their eggs. Juvenile batfish gazed impassively from the crumpled palm fronds, while tiny cuttlefish the size of toenails darted around the rope. It’s the weirdest check-out dive in the world.

Closer to shore, there’s a house reef, Paradise Two, which is bursting with little marvels. Here you can find the flamboyant cuttlefish, a living light show that is lusted after by macro photographers. It’s only about the size of a mouse, but it’s a great little performer – it doesn’t swim, but walks across the reef, using its lower arms and the paired flaps off the underside of its body as feet. When it finds a tiny crustacean or fish, two hunting arms slowly extend towards the quarry. Then it strikes with a too-fast-to-see lunge. Dinner is served. What makes the flamboyant cuttlefish such a star is its crazy, undulating colour display – silver and black stripes flash and rotate around its flanks, while the tips of its tentacles blush a rich purple.

When sleeping under a rock, it uses its colour changing chromatophores to impersonate the drab surrounds. But when it’s out and hunting, the message is all too obvious: ‘Hello: here I am. I’m ridiculously poisonous, so don’t even think about eating me.’ On the same dive, I came across a beachball-sized giant cuttlefish which raised its tentacles in a defensive posture as I approached it. Two miles from Mabul is Kapalai Island, where dynamite bombing once decimated large areas of reef. As with Mabul, it has been colonized by exotic benthic animals that thrive without the competition of larger predators. Here, the surviving coral walls give way to sloping sandy bottoms, where the monotonous terrain is punctuated by small coral outcrops. These oases support a bewildering concentration of life: on a colony of red whip coral just a metre across, I counted more than 40 tiny gobies. Below a patch of soft coral, I found a pair of harlequin ghost pipefish. Hanging motionless they blended seamlessly with the coral, their only movement being an occasional flicker of a wary eye as I edged closer toward them. The attraction of observing these diminutive jewels is quite distinct from the current-driven adrenalin rush of Sipadan. I first dived at Sipadan in 1996, when there were fears that it was being dived out. Five years on, and there’s less coral that is healthy, but the fish, reef sharks and turtles seem to occur in reassuringly large numbers.

Barracuda Point is still one of the best drift dives in the world. You drop in along the famous wall, then follow it round to a series of sandy gullies. You are swept past dozing white-tip reef sharks, variegated sharks (everyone calls them ‘leopard sharks’, which is wrong), over a landscape dominated by 2m-high barrel sponges and colonies of garden eels. Then you reach a point where currents converge, and anything can happen. Here, I’ve seen black-tip sharks, dogtooth tuna and big schools of jackfish, all lingering in the current. It’s a different dive every time. At Mabul, it’s a different story. Here, the animals are often slow-movers with small territories, where you can sit and watch them over a sustained period. I wanted to learn more about this subtle environment, so I spoke to Mabul’s resident marine biologist, Yoshi Hirata. ‘Mabul has a variety of habitats – sand bottom, seagrass, drop-offs, inner reef, outer reef, lagoon. But Sipadan is an atoll – a pinnacle in the ocean where the principal environment is the drop-off. It doesn’t get the same variety,’ he explained. ‘The environment dictates the animals that inhabit it. Mabul sits on the edge of Borneo’s continental shelf. On the mainland it rains every night over the world’s oldest forest, and the nutrients are swept into the rivers and down to the ocean. At the estuaries and around the coast, this nutrient-rich water is too muddy for coral to form, but Mabul is sufficiently far away to receive the benefits of the nutrients, without being suffocated by mud.’

Mabul’s variety of habitats has made it an ideal place for fish study. Over the past seven years, 17 new species have been found there, and more discoveries are likely. During my stay at Mabul, the eminent marine biologist, Dr Eugenie Clarke, arrived with a team to carry out studies on a strange little fish called the ‘convict blenny’. ‘Actually, they are Pholidichthyidae – a distinct goby-like species,’ Clarke told me over a cool tequila one evening. ‘During the day, they occur in great numbers, sometimes in schools several metres long, composed of thousands of small juveniles. At night they go back home, retreating into holes in the reef where the adults spend most of their time.’ Adult Pholidichthyidae are rarely seen by divers, but Clarke’s team showed me some video footage they had taken of the interior of a convict goby ‘nest’ using an adapted surgical camera that was poked into the reef. You could see the juveniles ‘sleeping’, attached to the coral by tiny, sticky threads secreted from pores between their eyes. The camera probed though this alien dormitory and finally located an adult, who was looking fairly bemused by the intrusion. While the juveniles looked like tiny catfish, the adults resembled beefed-up blennies.

Some of Mabul’s most fascinating creatures live right under the jetty where the dive boats are moored, notably the pugnacious white damselfish. Yoshi is convinced that these fish, and many others, are capable of learning surprisingly quickly. ‘The white damsel has a territory in the sand where it cultivates and feeds on a little farm of algae,’ he said. ‘If a goatfish tries to raid this larder, the damsel chases it away. They are very fastidious farmers: if you drop a tiny rock onto their farm, they pick it up and shift it off their turf. They only attack fish that disturb the farm.’ Damselfish are equally dismayed by the clumsy divers who unintentionally kick up the algae farms. I approached a patch of algae (it looks like discoloured sand) under the jetty, and a damsel flew at me, snapping its mouth and making making distressed chirruping noises. ‘The fish attacked you because it knows from experience that divers can disrupt the algae farm,’ Yoshi explained. ‘But when you visit a site where divers do not go, the damsels are not angered by your presence. These fish learn very quickly.’ While on the subject of territory, divers should be aware of the current rules that govern diving at Sipadan. These days, tourists staying at Mabul are permitted to dive only once a day at Sipadan (you can pick from one of the three boat dives that Sipadan Water Village run every day). The airy ‘water village’ accommodation at Mabul is far more luxurious than the huts of Sipadan. Tellingly, Mabul tends to be more popular with serious photographers and experienced divers who have already stayed at Sipadan. Visiting British tourists will often split their holiday between Mabul and Sipadan, spending four or five days on each island.

A word about terrorism. Sipadan’s idyllic image was destroyed on Easter Sunday, 2000, when members of the Philippine terror group Abu Sayyaf took 21 divers hostage. They were held in a jungle stronghold on the island of Jolo for several months before their ransoms were paid off – bizarrely – by the Libyan dictator, Colonel Gadaffi. Needless to say, Sipadan’s tourist numbers plunged. During my stay, there was a very visible military presence. The Malaysian Navy has invested in some super-speed armoured boats which they use to patrol the waters around Mabul and Sipadan.

At the time of writing, the cognoscenti holds that Sipadan has better protection than before, and Mabul is even more secure. There were mutterings, though, that the Turtle Islands to the north are far more vulnerable. Abu Sayyaf – which supposedly has links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network – is currently preoccupied with jungle battles against the Philippine army, but its movements and tactics are at best unpredictable. The whole issue was changed by the September 11 attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, which took place during my stay on Mabul. In one day, it became evident that the tensions that led to the Sipadan kidnappings had not gone away – they had gone global.

Simon Rogerson travelled to Mabul with Divequest, and flew with Malaysia Airlines. A five-night stay on Mabul with unlimited diving costs £903, while the airfares are £624 for most of the year (but from July 1 to August 15 and December 10–24, the price is £861). The author would like to express his gratitude to all members of staff at Sipadan Water Village, and to the Tanjung Aru Shangri-La resort in Kota Kinabalu.