Diving in Sipadan, Malaysia

The beauty of blue dives

We are going hunting

Said one of the dive masters. This was Day 5, my last day in Sipadan in May 2025.

This is off-season for hammerhead sharks so we didn’t really have our hopes high.

Blue dives entails leaving the reef/ wall to swim out into the open sea. Just as the name suggests, a blue dive is literal blue all around.

It is a surreal experience. Without a reference point, it gets quickly disorienting.

The blue dives of the past few days yielded silhouettes of sharks down below 40 metres.

The holy grail at Sipadan would be seeing a school of hammer heads or eagle rays in the blue.

Since it was my last day, I didn’t have my hopes up.

But as we went deep – 30 odd metres as logged on my dive computer – suddenly the divers around me started making sounds.

I could see 2 sharks. But the side profile made me second guess. Triple guess. Is it really a hammer head?

Can I move closer? Would I scare it away?

So with the biggest magnification I could try on a canon G7 under water, I snapped a couple of shots.