The Borneo voyage continues

The surface of the Celebes (Sulawesi) Sea hides a curve of land stretching about 30 miles roughly west-east. In a few isolated places the land lifts its head above the sea but it occurs mostly as reef below the surface (olive patches in the chart below). Head your boat southwards (on the safe blue patches) and watch the depth reading as it changes dramatically from less than 10m to more than 500m: you have driven over the drop-off of the reef, a wall that plummets to the sea bottom along the length of this land. Continue and the sea bed gradually drops to well over a kilometre, then rises to 700m and Pulau Sipadan, a tiny rainforest-covered tropical island, suddenly appears from the abyss.

This area is under-water heaven: the Indo-Pacific basin is the richest marine habitat in the world, a centre of marine bio-diversity, and P Sipadan is one of the world’s top dive sites… a marine reserve where the range and variety and numbers of marine life is astounding.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.The last stop of the Sail Malaysia Rally was Tawau - a functional town if ever there was one, but they had more fish at their market than we have seen anywhere else; asked where they obtained their fish, as stocks are dwindling throughout Asia, their terrifying answer was “night fishing off Pulau Sipadan”! Here we got another introduction to bad Malaysian anchorages: strong currents and strange eddies in which boats moved around in unpredictable fashion and poor holding in thin, soft mud. On our second night there were only two yachts; a storm blew up and a very disorientated Ketoro crew woke in shock with sirens directly behind us and bright spotlights on our rocking, rolling boat... provided by the other boat that was being blown and pushed down onto us and only metres away! We survived that heart-stopping experience but it set a trend for anchorages over the next few weeks: there was not to be peaceful sleep for some time!

Into this space came Geoff, Sue and Nikki Candy, our guests for about two weeks, who had come to experience the diving with us and also some Borneo land travel.

On a previous visit to Ketoro (in the Maldives) their mettle was tested by having no fresh water on board (water-maker was broken); this time we had water (although the normal boating restrictions applied, particularly with 5 sharing the facilities and resources) but no battery charging from the generator and furthermore, we had sliced a hole in the inflatable dinghy on the non-dinghy-friendly jetty of the Tawau Yacht Club, which we were unable to fix. The dinghy is our car, our means to get anywhere from the boat… critical! Rolf’s many attempts at repairs had all failed (quite hard to keep all those little air molecules trapped inside!) but he got it to a stage where, with big pump on board, you could pump up the offending pontoon as you travelled (and were we imagining it, or did the escaping bubbles give us a touch more speed in our progress, albeit in circles!?).

Night 1 at sea was on Horn Reef (left red X in chart photo) where we saw nothing but a single stilted home of a fisherman above the water, while underwater there was coral and fish we had not seen before: an auspicious start to the marine promise of the area.

As much as the dinghy problems were out of our control, so too was the endless set of lessons then forced on our guests in “the ups and downs (challenges and headaches) of anchoring”. Night 2 saw us off Pulau Mabul (second set of red crosses in chart above), with the anchor happily ensconced in good white sand near some lovely bommies at the end of a resort jetty, and planned so that dawn would see us wiping the sleep out of our eyes with a refreshing snorkel from the back steps.

Not to be… that was the first storm night. The storm arrived at about 2am and whipped up the sea; resulting in us scurrying around ensuring all was safely stowed and closed, then checking the instruments to see if the boat anchor was holding. A few further attempts at shut-eye were futile, as we saw that the boat was slowly but surely being dragged from its initial anchoring position. On this occasion, being dragged was not a crisis as it was away from shallow areas and there were no boats near us, but necessitated a move to new anchorage the next day.

Night 2 at Mabul came and… so did a storm. The previous night’s checks were repeated, and she was firm. Well, what that means is that our anchor was not dragging... Ketoro was CERTAINLY not firm!! Our new position gave us the dubious joy of a variety of large swells, reflected round the sides of the island, meaning: roll to left, roll to right, slam forward and backward and… repeat! We had this dance nightly for the next three days, and the only thing that dragged was our bodies as we tried to get them out of bed in the mornings after the disturbed nights!

Amazingly, the days were lovely and allowed us to enjoy them fully… despite the fact that (as we subsequently learned) the weather was due to a “super typhoon” over the Philippines. Those days saw us being collected by a dive boat and being taken for two day trips, with three dives each day. Diving at Mabul and nearby Kapalai was a wonderful day; diving at Sipadan took our breath away…

The island is a tiny tropical paradise: a dense deep-green rainforest that is fringed by sparkling white sand; stroll into the turquoise water until knee deep and suddenly the ground gives way to a 600m drop-off. Diving alongside this wall is astounding: look up and see turtles gracefully swimming way above you, a reef shark searching for tasty morsels above or alongside you, large predators searching for their meals; along the wall, a diverse range of spectacular healthy coral of vibrant colours and sizes hosts millions of marine creatures, while hundreds of fish continue their lives unconcerned by your presence. Look straight down… and wonder at what else the further 575m beneath may hold!

We saw huge shoals of fish, a tornado of barracuda, incredible huge individuals and the tiniest, brightest-coloured or most odd creatures. Thank heavens Geoff had an underwater camera with him... all these photos are his handiwork.

The wall holds secrets: a series of caves where turtles over the ages (and a few divers) have become disorientated and drowned; it provides ledges and small caves where you come upon sharks or turtles resting, and you need eagle (or a predator’s?) eyes to distinguish some of the creatures (like the "sea dragon" in this photo, on the right) from the corals in which they are hiding.

On each occasion we came up from the depths filled with awe, with every expectation having being met. This experience was incredible and we felt very privileged to have been here…. and very sorry that we had only a day scheduled at this particular island!

The conservation of this marine park area is managed very carefully and the numbers of divers per day is strictly limited to 120. There was also once trouble in paradise (in 2000, a Philippine terrorist group, the Abu Sayyaf, took tourists hostage from Sipadan Island), resulting in the few resorts on this remote island being closed down and dive operators having to function from afar, each operator only given a certain number of permits per week.

Illegal Indonesians and Philippines appear to threaten the safety of life on this coast of Borneo Malaysia: the police believed that such outsiders were the culprits in the burglaries on our 3 rally boats as well as another 3 yachts that were burgled at another anchorage. We regularly saw the Malaysian Marine forces patrolling the waters, mooring near our boats or calling us up when on passage; although locals laugh and believe they are ineffective - we enjoyed the visual deterrent of them being near us. Some rally boats went no further than the top of Borneo Island, not venturing down this east side at all as their insurers did not cover them in this area.

After a champagne dinner to celebrate our Sipadan dive day, it was time to move on… but not so fast: first there was another anchoring lesson and test.Trying to lift anchor from our hold-fast-in-Mabul spot, she was stuck FAST: no wonder we did not drag! However, a chain that will not lift is an unhappy situation, and the anchor was 16m below us, so Rolf had to don scuba gear, Geoff his snorkel gear for surface work and to convey progress reports and instructions, and Irene had to drive the boat to get the anchor chain dislodged.

Mission accomplished, and we said farewell to Mabul, moving on to a beautiful forested island further north that rose high from the sea, just to show our friends that there is land above the water too.

Sea travel in Asia is interesting because of the variety of fascinating fishing villages and boats seen on the water.

Taking the Candys to Lahad Datu where we were to abandon them to their own explorations of orang-utans, proboscis monkeys and other strange and lovely creatures endemic to Borneo in the jungle along the Kinabatangan River (and see for themselves the massively encroaching palm oil plantations: see our previous blog), we saw another different fishing structure: what we believe to be a small shrimp-fishing village that is moved between fishing grounds by being pushed by a small motorised craft, then anchors until those grounds are depleted.

We spent three days sailing Ketoro to Sandakan, where we met our friends again. Sandakan was established in the 1870s when a Scottish adventurer delivered guns to the Sultan of Sulu who … basically gave it to him as a base. The town grew but then “ceased to exist” as a town after WW2, when it was flattened by the Allied forces in an effort to liberate it from the Japanese, and subsequently the rest was burned down by the Japanese. However, there are some lovely excursions: the self-guided trails of the Rainforest Discovery Centre gave us all a chance to enjoy the sights of rare plants and birds, endemic to Borneo; giant and tiny squirrels, and flying lizards (seen below, wings in but giving a display of aggression), often seen from the canopy walkway at the top of this magnificent forest.

Most oddly, the town has an English Country Tea Garden in the grounds of the home of the British Conservator of Forests and his wife: tea and scones in Borneo overlooking the grubby, ugly city seems strange… but lift your eyes and see over the large bay to rolling hills and forests the other side… and wonder at what is hiding away! Agnes Keith, the authoress wife, wrote “Land below the Wind”, her story of Borneo, the island that does not become beset by the terrible typhoons and storms that pummel the Philippines: well, maybe they do not lay siege to Borneo but we now know that this island feels the edges of those storms, and sometimes friends visiting yachts are subject to these trials to give them a taste of one aspect of this cruising life! With the visitors departed, it was time for us to set off back around the top of Borneo and start on a long return journey. We gave ourselves a treat at the start:

Lankayan Island is a marine park and resort with a wonderful turtle conservation programme, monitoring the many turtles that lay eggs on their island, collecting the eggs and placing the hatchlings into the sea. With two nights firmly attached to their mooring buoy, we had the privilege of seeing about 300 baby turtles being introduced to their new watery home (unfortunately also witnessing some of the little creatures becoming tasty morsels) and also watched a huge green turtle digging a massive hole in the dark. After more than an hour, she gave up on one hole as it had too many roots and moved to start on another; we left to return to our boat and a good sleep (no fears of dragging nor struggling with anchors!) and heard that she finally laid her eggs into her fourth hole.

On the dive the following day, we looked at the turtles with renewed respect and understanding of their trials … and are in awe of the fact that any survive at all. Borneo has a way of making one very aware of the balance of life and how tenuous so much of our world’s heritage really is.