Lankayan Island, Malaysia

by Ben Pemberton

At the beginning of this August I was lucky enough to dive in warm water, as I went on honeymoon with my wife Tracy to Borneo. We travelled around the Malaysian part of the island, spending 4 nights on the tiny Lankayan Island, a 90 minute boat ride off the coast in the Sulu Sea.

The island is covered in trees and only takes 15 minutes to walk around. The island has coral all they way round it and is in a marine reserve. There are 20 chalets with a central restaurant area.

The diving was excellent, visibility was only 5 to 10 metres, but there was lots of coral, fishes and other marine life to look at. It took quite a time after each dive to look up everything I’d seen! Most of the sealife was fairly small; the whale sharks visit the area between March and May. Leopard sharks, blue spotted rays, lionfish, jawfish, butterflyfish, batfish and moray eels were just some of the fish I saw. Then in the last minute of my last dive one of the others pointed to a large green turtle which was lying on the see bed. It got up and swam off, a perfect end to the diving.

We could also snorkel around the island; the coral was shallow and became exposed at low tide.

Diving was simple, 15mins before the dive we turned up at the end of the jetty, picked our kit up and hopped in the boats which took a maximum of 5minutes to reach the site. We all went in at the same time, so when we finished our dive, it was straight back to the island. The only concern was the diving discipline wasn’t as strict as I am used to with the club. As Tracy wasn’t diving, I had to be paired with other divers. Buddy checks weren’t that thorough and I got funny looks when I started waving my DSMB about.

There was also a Malaysian Navy presence on the Island. They had a speedboat and 20 soldiers at look out points around the island. I didn’t find out if it was to protect the tourists or guard the marine reserve.

The other highlight of the stay was seeing the baby turtles. The adult hawksbill and green turtles had laid their eggs at the end of June/beginning of July. Two batches of hawksbill turtles hatched on consecutive days, they were released at the top of the beach at 5.30pm and set off on their life’s adventure. On the morning of our departure a batch of green turtles hatched.

Cambridge Sub Aqua Club

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