Tuesday, 8 June 2010
The storms did abate relatively early during the night, but the in the morning the skies were scattered with thick clouds and the winds were still fresh, but blowing offshore. We had coffee in the room then went to the lobby to find our driver already there and waiting for us. At the end of the short trip to the marina we noticed the boat we had been using for the previous two days had been replaced by a smaller single-engine monohull.
Robert was running just a few minutes late and was profusely apologetic, but he had our lunch, snacks and more drinks than we could handle. We got underway and as we exited the marina we saw the seas were very calm despite the overnight wind. This was fantastic and even though the first day had been rough, Tracy found the boat diving to be great fun, mainly because you get on and off the boats with minimal fuss and as they know I suffer from seasickness there is a speedy exit from the boat and we go straight down to get out of any swell. Unlike the boat dives in Perth where there is so much hanging around it gets nauseating.
The further south and offshore we got, the lighter the wind became until eventually at the first dive site there was no wind at all. The sea wasn’t as blue as on the first day of diving, but it was certainly bluer than the previous day (when it had a considerable green tint).
Dive 7 – Batu Belais. “The underwater jungle of Sarawak.” What a magnificent way to start the day. The water was warm (30+C), the visibility was excellent (30-40m) the bottom at 22m was easily visible from the boat. This place abounds with gorgonian fans and their inhabitants, micro life is abundant (finding nudibranchs is not hard, they’re everywhere here, and in some instances in massive heaving balls), there were more bumphead parrotfish, lion fish, stone fish, big fish, small fish, hard corals, soft corals, awesome stuff! There was hardly any current whilst deep, but an appreciable surface current became apparent at 5m and stronger again at 3m.
Dive 8 – Sunday Rock Garden. Another brilliant dive down to about 18m in a coral garden that had no end in sight (even though visibility was still 30+m). This was the dive where, if you hadn’t seen it before, it was here. The fans and ferns, the fish and the corals. There was sooo much to see you began to get overwhelmed. You could spend a lifetime underwater here and still not find everything. Lobsters hidden in their tiny holes with only their antennae poking out, the zillion different varieties of fish, bubble anemones, corals… it was very impressive.
Dive 9 – Eve Garden (West Point). This is the western extremity of the reef where we have already done a couple of dives. After the luncheon surface interval, the wind had picked up a bit and the surface current had also strengthened. As we were going to be diving in 7m we were preparing ourselves for a swim against the current; we were right. We spent most of the dive heading into the current, but thankfully near the bottom it was significantly less than at the surface. It was shallow enough for us to take the housing-less camera for a last roll of the dice, it survived and we managed to get a few decent photos.
Waxing poetic, none of Picasso, Michelangelo nor any of the masters could paint this picture; they simply don’t have enough colours to truly represent this scenery. Scott got annoyed at one point as there was so much to photograph it was hard to keep up and there was so much to see. As we swam along the bottom, large schools of squid watched us from above, the wary and shy bumpheads again kept us under surveillance, a blue-spotted ray hidden deep in the coral kept a wary eye out.
At the turn around point, we simply stopped swimming and let the current effortlessly race us back to the ascent line and the boat.
A summary of the 9 dives. The tourism literature compares Miri with Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai, but they are actually completely different types of diving. If you want to go deep and hang alongside a dark, bottomless wall, then head to Sipadan. If you like muck diving on the house reefs at Kapalai and Mabul, then you would love Miri just as we have loved diving here; there are more sharks and turtles in Sabah, but the fans and corals here are much more abundant and therefore they host more micro-life. We loved diving in Miri.
When we arrived back at the marina, our driver was there waiting as usual and took us to the Tropical Dives office for us to pay our bills, then took us back to the hotel; shower then siesta, you know the routine.
Just after sunset we headed out for dinner, trying somewhere different for our last night in Miri. We went to Mings, a western-styled sidewalk bar cum restaurant for an ok meal, but a good lassi. After dinner we took a lap around the block, then back to the hotel.