Great time to go.

(snip)

It's always good time to go :-)

Well, the oil rig is not anchored at SIpadan, but Mabul. There're 3 islands
forming a triangle: Sipadan, MAbul , Kapalai (which is actually a reef with
a wooden divecentre on top of it).

I've been to all of them, but lived on Sipadan. It is the most beautiful
place to stay. A paradise island.
MAbul is much bigger, but having not a lot of trees - "bald" I'd say.

Kapalai is just a reef, so you live on a wooden platform.

If you decide to stay on Sipadan, you can make boat dives around two other
islands as well. Its 20-40 min by boat (depending on weather). It's worth to
go, because there is different reef and life there.

The most breathtaking is Sipadan of course :-)

If you decide to go to S., I'd advice to stay at Sipadan Dive Centre or
Borneo Divers - both the oldest and best situated (at the drop off - the
only place you make beach dives).
They will offer you 3 boat dives per day and unlimited beach dives.
You get meal/snack 5 times a day, drinks all the time (all included in a
package)

Practically you can make 5-6 dives a day.
The best dive-site is Barracuda Point (check it: www.bubblemaker.pl).
On the night dive you must go to the entrance of Turtle Cave and see
flashing fish. Absolutely No.1 !

I wish you a pleasant trip ;-)
Filip

I just came back from Sipadan/Mabul a week ago.

We stayed at Sipadan Water Village (SWV) which is really on the island of
Mabul.  The Seaventures rig was right off-shore from our hotel.  I wouldn't
like to stay there because the "shore" dive under the rig has a square
profile of 45-55 feet.  There's not much to see on the pilings on your way
up (although we did find a frogfish halfway up once).  On the other hand,
the diving at 50 ft was superb!  I did 5 dives there over the course of 10
days--great place to take pictures!  Frogfish in many colors and sizes,
crocodile fish piled on top of each other (really), plenty of nudibranchs,
scorpionfish, schools of grunts & coronetfish, cleaner shrimp, old
construction debris for things to hide in, and more.  If there's a current,
you can't "shore" dive because you might have to be picked up downcurrent.
You could plan to come up a line (if they have one, which I didn't see, but
I stayed at one end of the rig), but would you want to swim back from
Sipadan if that didn't work out?  This trip, we made several dives there
without appreciable current. On our previous trip to SWV, however, there was
a ripping current above 20 feet, so we did our safety stop flying through
the water away from the rig and our hotel.  You definitely couldn't swim to
shore from this dive site.

There is no snorkeling on Seaventures, unless you go somewhere by boat.
That's a deal breaker for me, because I love to snorkel in between dives.

SWV is a great place to stay. We've been there twice. The shore diving and
service are outstanding! Although the rooms don't have air conditioning,
they are huge and well appointed and private. The SWV resort is built over a
lagoon, so you can walk out on your private porch and look down at the reef.
When the tides aren't too low, you can snorkel under your hotel room.  It's
really neat during the extra low tides at full moon: the coral reef under
the resort is partially out of the water. The leathery soft corals close
themselves up to keep from drying out. There's another resort on the island
that's on land. They seemed to have little AC units on each room.  We didn't
have trouble with bugs in our cotttage or at the restaurant, and didn't have
to use bug spray (in contrast, a woman we met at Sipadan's Drop Off Cafe who
was staying on Sipadan was covered in fly and mosquito bites!).

On twilight/night shore dives & snorkels at SWV this trip, I saw: mating
mandarinfish; a tiny (1") white octopus on the sand; a 1.5 ft long
long-snout pipefish; banded and regular pipefish including pregnant males (I
quit counting at 12); robust host pipefish (shaped like a blade of grass); a
stargazer;  big squid; flounder and sole; painted frogfish; many shrimp;
eels; sea snakes; red hairy lobster; sea pens (coral) with tiny crabs and
shrimp all over them; box crabs; and more.  Slightly annoying things about
SWV's night dives: you have to go with a guide and you have to be back by 8
PM (so the emergency boat driver can go home).  The cost of guided night
dives was included in our package but they usually charge extra.

On day dives on Mabul (at the resort and farther out by boat, we saw sailfin
blennys; mushroom coral pipefish; ornate ghost pipefish; pygmy seahorses;
regular seahorses; colorful Coleman shrimp on a fire urchin; snake & moray
eels; cleaner stations with fish & shrimp cleaning groupers; devilfish (a
kind of scorpion fish with claws); lion fish; many types of shrimp gobies;
smallish groupers; schools of coronetfish; turtles; lobsters; many
parrotfish & wrasse; crinoid shrimp and squat lobsters; and lots more. There
were many anemone fish of all types. Clownfish seem to have been renamed in
a universal language: Nemo!

On day dives at Sipadan (at least one or two each day), we saw a school of
100 or so bumphead parrotfish, which milled around like sheep while we took
many photos; mating green sea turtles (which is a story all of its own);
green and hawksbill turtles doing regular turtle stuff; a shark cleaning
station with over a dozen white tip reef sharks; schools of jacks; lots of
nudibranchs; pygmy seahorses; many types of triggerfish, parrotfish, and
wrasse; big heaps of crinoids; and the usual reef fishes & corals.

We also went to nearby Kapalai several times, which is (as other posters
have reported) just a sandbar with a hotel on stilts above it. Sort of like
SWV without the island...  The dives near the hotel were good, but murky.
The dives out a ways but still on the island shelf were outstanding, esp.
the ones named 2nd Bouy & Don King Yama by the SWV folks.  Some of our best
dives were here. We saw skeleton shrimp (tiny little amphipods, really);
ornate ghost pipefish; several frogfish, 1 inch to 18 inches in length;
pygmy seahorses; octopus & cuttlefish; nudibranchs; cleaner shrimp; a map
pufferfish let us photograph him up close while he was being cleaned at a
shrimp station, and followed us around later in the dive to see what we were
up to (which is definitely not normal pufferfish behavior); a small turtle
that wanted to play with everyone; wire coral shrimp & crabs; leaf
scorpionfish in several colors; and lots of other cool stuff.

The weather was good the whole time (10 days).  As I recall, it rained twice
(once really hard) at night; once for a little while in the afternoon; and
was warm and partly cloudy the rest of the time. The wind was calm for 2
days (we had flat water, which was great) and breezy most of the rest of the
time (made the water a bit choppy, but not too bad).  The last afternoon we
were there, an extra low tide at noon combined with some strong winds (which
made it pleasantly cool during the day) to produce 4 ft surge.  They
couldn't tie the boats up at the dock to leave for the afternoon dive, so
they swam the gear and divers out to the boat.  That was exciting to watch,
but I was glad I wasn't diving, that's for sure. On the leeward side of the
island (we walked over there), the water was low, but calm and flat for the
dives.  The swells were smaller when they came back from the dive, so they
could dock.  Alex, who's worked at the dive operation and resort for years,
said that it was the roughest water he'd ever seen at the resort.

The dive briefings were good.  They  have a great permanent map of the shore
dives from the resort and draw pictures of the reef for others.  Our group
of 13 was all photographers, and our guides usually did a good job of
showing everyone things, although a couple of times the laggards got to hunt
critters for themselves if they didn't keep up on a drift. If you told the
guide you were going to follow, he or she waited for you. If you asked to
see a particular creature, they tried to find it for you.  The guides all
seem to have a network of critter sightings, so they can usually find
things.  The only two things I wanted to see that no one saw were the
flamboyant cuttlefish and blue-ringed octopus (they said a blue ring had
been seen by snorkelers under the dive shop a couple of weeks before we
came, but I didn't find one). Most of the guides had underwater
etch-a-sketch devices they used to write down what they were showing you.

You can do as many shore dives as you want between 6 am and dark; the only
rule is that you have to have a 1 hour surface interval before a boat dive
(and, of course, the night dive rule I mentioned earlier). I understand that
the 1 hour rule is enforced, although I didn't see it happen (but neither
did I try to do a boat dives soon after a shore dive).  There are dive shop
folks around all the time to answer questions and help you with your gear.
If you're taking a self-guided shore dive during the day, you write your
dive number on a board and then mark off when you return, so they know if
they need to come look for you if you don't return.  If you forget to mark
yourself off, they hunt around the resort for you before sending out the
search parties. I've never seen them fail to find the "lost" diver on shore,
so I don't know what their search efforts are like.

SWV has the best shore diving arrangement I've ever seen.  Each diver has a
lockable gear locker, a fat hanger for your wetsuit, and a place to hang
your BC & regulator. The tanks are 5-10 feet from where you assemble your
gear; which is maybe another 10 feet from the end of the dock you dive from.
If you want help hauling your gear that distance, it was easy to get (except
one time, I confess, when everyone seemed to be on siesta at 3:30 PM).  When
the water gets choppy or the surge is up (or you just look like you need
help), they come out onto the dock to help you out of the water and take
your gear up.  The dock has multiple levels, to accomodate the various tide
levels.
For boat dives, they take your BC & reg and hook it up on the boat.  You
carry your other stuff (they'll help) to the boat.  They bring everything
back after the dive.

The boats don't have a camera platform or camera tank, so you end up holding
your camera or placing it on the deck during the short trips to the dive
sites.  We put ourour cameras on the deck of the boat and didn't have any
trouble13, although I admit that we didn't have any strangers on our
boats--there were exactly 2 boats' worth of divers in our group, so we were
on boats by ourselves.  On Mabul & Kapalai dives, you go back to the resort
for your surface interval. On the 2-tank dives at Sipadan, we went to the
Drop Off Cafe for our surface interval.  They had a fresh water hose at the
cafe to rinse off cameras and tables where you can work on your camera
between dives.  Back at the resort, there were several tanks just for
cameras, plus many more for BCs and other dive gear.

They provided snacks between dives. Snacks were usually baked goods (one day
we had mayonnaise sandwiches on really good home baked bread. That was a
little weird, but tasty!), but sometimes fried bananas or meat pies.  There
was always cold water to be had, plus coffee, tea, and hot chocolate (well,
you make it yourself with Milo cocoa powder, creamer, sugar, and hot water).
On surface intervals at Sipadan, they brought food and the Drop Off Cafe
provided the coffee, tea, and cocoa.  I had an excellent snorkel one day
with a huge school of jacks at the drop off and under the cafe pier.

If you're looking for a travel agent that understands divers and does a
great job with exotic trips, including Sipadan/Mabul/Kapalai, try Vickie
Coker at Travel Masters (http://www.travel-masters.net/). Travel Masters is
in Austin, Texas, but they plans trips for people all over. You can get
e-mail address and a toll-free number on the web site. Vickie has personally
been to Sipadan & Mabul many times and knows the people and ropes. I don't
work there and I don't get anything if you contact them.  I just book trips
with them, travel in some of their group trips, and buy gear at their dive
store, Scubaland Adventures (http://www.scubaland.com/).

Enjoy your trip!