Hi,
I am just back from a short Easter break in Brunei. We did 2 days of diving on a 3 dives per day package.
I wrote a trip report for my local (Singapore) dive club, and am duplicating some of the information here.
We had arranged a pickup with our dive operator, and they picked us up around 8 AM to go to the dive shop. We set up all our equipment in the dive shop, and left around 10 AM on a small boat (8 people) with a canvas roof. All the dive sites are a fair distance from the coast, so we appreciated that the boat had a good engine. It still took us around 30 minutes to get to the site.
Our first dive was an oilrig that was sunken in 1994. The rig is broken in 3 or 4 large sections. The structures are very big and have some fair growth on them. The visibility was 12 to 15 meters, and maximum depth is around 20 meters. There is limited fish life around the structures, and we only see some common nudibranches. One thing that is available in abundance are jellyfish: the water is alive with long strings of Salp Jellyfish, which is a kind of tunicates. They do not sting.
Our second dive is the Bolkiah wreck, a smallish wreck in 25 meters of water. The wreck seems surrounded by a cloud of sand and the visibility is around 6 to 8 meters. The wreck is quite open and easy to penetrate. We see a big school of silversides, a few nudibranches and the ubiquitous jellyfish. The dive is ok, but not really worth travelling for.
As a third dive we do a very shallow corral garden. (Pilong North) Maximum depth is 8 meters, and the visibility is around 12 to 15 meters. We see lots of nudibranches: Jorunna Rubescens, a Halgerda Tesselata and several Chromodoridae. Towards the end of the dive we see a group of at east 100 squid.
The dive shop drops us off around 7 PM at our hotel, and we dont really have much energy left to do anything.
The next morning we debate if we will dive again because we got seriously sunburnt the first day (even with a roof on the boat), and we were not too impressed by the dives the first day, but after some deliberation we decide to give it another go.
Our first dive is the Blue Water Wreck, a wreck 18 miles from the coast (50 minutes boat drive), lying on its port side in 35 meters of water. The visibility is excellent: we see the 80 meters long wreck as soon as we start our descent. A huge tuna (>2 meters) disappears in the blue as we start to circle the wreck. There are 3 places where you can penetrate the wreck, but because of its depth and its size we decide to concentrate on the outside. It is easy to see the boat structure (the boat sunk in the eighties), and there is heaps of life on and around the boat.
One of the first discoveries are the shrimps: the whole boat is covered in shrimps that are absolutely not shy but instead stare back at us. We see some very pretty nudibranches, and loads of fish around the wreck: there are the schools of small fish, the cornet fish, the snappers etc. You can see that the site is not often visited: it is in very good condition.
After the dive we have a visit of the Malaysian Marine Police: they are patrolling the area because of the conflict between Sabah and the Philippines, and also seem to think that there might be some economic advantages in stopping us. Our Philippine dive master feels very bad at ease (it is not clear if the site is in Malaysian or Brunei waters), and decides to change plans and make sure we move away from the border. This means no second dive on the Blue Water Wreck, and the Cement Wreck is also out of the question.
Instead we visit the American Wreck, a ship that was sunk during WWII and still has ammunition scattered across its deck. The boat is broken up and the maximum depth is around 30 meters. The visibility is bad (5 to 8 meters), but there is lots of life around the boat: lots of shrimps again, snappers, schools of silversides and a school of around 500 to 1000 yellowtail barracudas. This site could be seriously good with better visibility!
As our last dive of the day we do Abano Reef, a coral garden with a max depth of 16 meters. There is a nasty current, and we stay close to the boat in the shelter of some boulders.
At the end of the day, we are happy that we persisted and did a second day of diving. That was really worth it.
The recommended dive sites are Blue Water Wreck, The American Wreck, the Cement Wreck and the oil rig. If you go for a 3 dives/ day package, you will always end up in shallow coral gardens in the afternoon, because most of the wreck dives are quite deep.
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