Sipadan dive trip Dec 06 Part 2

Sibuan/ Mantabuan Day 3 and 4:









Sibuan is probably one of our favourite dive sites because the island is really beautiful. Small isolated island, overhung with clear, cloudless blue skies, merging with the horizon of crystal clear blue waters of different shades. Pretty! It is also called the sun-burn island, true indeed when I got heat-stroke at the very last day there...man it was a horrible feeling! But then, I still love this island. This island is well known for small things...probably what we call Muck diving. We saw the Mandarin fish here at Mandarin point, living among sea urchins and very shy little creatures...so hard to get good pics of them..hiaks! They're abt 7cm long, labelled the most colourful fish in the world! Bight blue, green and brown. I've got video of them, probably clearer.

Mandarin fish

Next thing on the list, the Frogfish. We were really excited when found the black resident frogfish, its ugly but very adorable..haha...it seems undaunted by our presence, continue sitting there believing in its camouflage. It looks like corals or coral rubble and you could easily miss it even if you've come face to face with it.

Can you see Mr Frogfish?

We call him Mr Yellow

Sometimes its the macro life that really fascinates you. As we swam further, scrutinizing every patch of sand, we spotted the snake eel, with its head poking out of the sand, and it looks like an ugly lizard!

Snake eel

Next, we saw the crocodile falt head. I'm very fascinated by this animal because I think it looks like a guitar!

corcodile flat head



I'm very happy to see the flounders and the soles, i think they look really 'alien'. Captured them on video on how they looked at me with their big moving eyes, their body partly covered by sand, and how they then tried so hard to flap away from me...funny!

Well beautiful macro life cannot be without the shrimps! Here, we saw an amazing variety. The anemone shrimp, bubble coral shrimp and crabs, the large 'bottocked' and bright green mantis shrimp which was too fast to hide, the clear cleaner shrimps, banded coral shrimp, and lobsters with about 20cm long feelers?? Accompanied by small pipefishes...that look like sea horses.

Anemone shrimp

Lobster, anyone wants to advise me what kind of lobster/shrimp this is?

Pipefish

bubble coral crab

At the place called Drop-off, we saw many nice naudibranches, scorpion fish, lionfish and a few sleepy turtles...









The thing I love most about this dive...the juvenile Harlequin sweetlips dancing in the water, twirling like a hawaiin dancer simply because its fins are too large for it to swim properly. Caught this little dance on video!


Mantabuan:

Sleepy juvenile puffer

Smiling moray eel posing for the shot



The trio

Introducing our sleepy darling....so sweet yah?

Tada! End of the day!