Mabul

The final island for diving around here is the one we are staying on, Mabul Island. This island includes a small community of locals, 4 dive resorts (5 if you count the SeaVentures oil derrick-like budget resort that sits in the water just off of the island), and a police station. It sounds big, but almost all of the resorts sit on stilts over the surrounding water. It takes about three minutes to walk to the other side of the island on its short side and probably 7 minutes across the other way (I'm not sure if it is possible to go that way though, having not set foot outside of our resort).



The Mabul Water Bungalows, the upmarket sister resort to ours, to which we have full access, has built an artificial reef right off of their jetty and other dive sites dot the surrounding reef. We were diving here for the 'A turtle tried to kiss me' post.


We were assigned to dive boat Smart 4 and had a great divemaster, Patrick, who was sadly taken from us after the first day to work with some Chinese tourists since he spoke both Cantonese and Mandarin. His replacement seemed to see his job as just that and took no interest in showing us the cool fish or even in looking around while he was diving. He just stared off into the blue until it was time for the safety stop. Our dive group was diverse, from Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and France, with one guy with lots of experience who had dove Sipadan for years, and a few at the same level as us. There was also a pair of buddies with the same amount of dives as us but who we were concerned for since they didn't plan their dives, wore no dive computers, and just assumed that they were okay as long as they stayed above at least one person in the group (but not always the same person). They were also often more than 10m away from each other and at different depths. The resort was the most lax about dive plans that we have seen so far, and just gave a max depth and max time during the briefing (which was too long to stay at that depth, so you really did have to do multilevel planning, follow the divemaster, or have a dive computer).



The locals go out to harvest during low tide. These cute little guys had just killed a fish when we went by on our way back in.