Our main destination on Borneo was Semporna. I was diving here last year with Kacka and was so impressed that I've decided on coming again with Ondrej. Same as last time, we were again diving with Scuba Junkie - since our last visit, they've greatly improved their dive shop and Semporna also felt a little bit more appealing. The fish market is still there though - this time we've seen there dead sharks and even mantas... it's really sad thing to see. To make it even worse, we've found out that the price dead manta fetches on the market is about 3 RM - that's 1$! It just doesn't make sense.
In total we spent 3 days diving. Luckily, we got to Sipadan the very first day - we saw again a lot of turtles and quite a few sharks as well, most of them white-tip reef sharks plus couple of grey reef ones. Somehow we missed the huge school of barracuda which made Sipadan famous. On the way there, the crew was telling us stories how they saw hammerheads and whalesharks couple days ago... Yeah, right. I've heard those before and didn't get my hopes up.
Second day we went to Bohayan (Ondrej's pictures) - this time Ondrej switched from wide-angle to macro lens and good thing he did that. The reefs were full of macro creatures, beautiful corals with unbelievable colors... To make the day even more perfect, we signed up for a night-dive. It took place in the semporna bay at the corner of local fish-farm. It's pretty much underwater dump, full of plastic cups, tins and all sorts of rubish. It's hard to believe how many creatures are living in this dump - sea horses, decorator crabs, squids... Third day we went to Mabul (Ondrej's pictures) which was really nice as well.
When diving at Mabul, we managed to drive our divemaster girl crazy. Not in a good way I'm afraid. She had no idea what "pros" are diving with her and was getting all worried in situations that me and Ondrej don't even notice anymore. For example - Ondrej was going through air fairly faster than me since he had to carry around that big camera of his. So, when he was low on air, he just came to me and we kept on diving on my air. I have long hose, so it's absolutely no issue. When the DM saw it, she almost swallowed he 2nd stage and was giving us really hard time when we got back to the boat :) Something is telling me that she will remember "the czech team" for a long time...
Which reminds me - the very first day we found out that there is another czech couple on the same boat with us. Next day we met a girl from Slovakia. To make it even better, she met our friend Patrick couple weeks before when she was diving in Philippines. As they were chatting, Patrick mentioned that he was diving with 2 czech guys in caves on Bermuda. And so, when she heard us talking czech and found out that Ondrej is from Bermuda, it clicked... The world is way too small!
We trully didn't want to leave - Sipadan is still the no.1 place to dive on my list. I have a feeling that Ondrej will have hard time getting back to diving on Bermuda :)