Dive trip report, Labuan , Borneo divers

Dive shop : Borneo divers
Dates     : 8:Th to 10:Th of April 1996
Dives     : 6

We dove with Borneo divers again, and everything went very smoothly. The diving was done from a small boat, you get briefed on the wreck, do your first dive, sit in the boat getting sun burned :-) and drinking soft drinks/water or eat some fruit and chat with the dive master for and hour then dive the same wreck again.

Visibility was not good, from 5 to maybe 10m (15 to 30 feet) and the water was cold compared to Sipadan.

Name  :   Unknown
Type    :   Cargo/Passenger Steamer
Length :   85m
Depth  :   33m/21m

This was my first dive on a real wreck, it was impressive, but Ill never be a hard core wreckdiver. Iīll stick to the corals and fishes. This wreck didnīt allow much penetration and is a very open wreck easy wreck to dive on and it is large and pretty impressive.

Name   :    MV Tung Hwang
Type   :    Freighter
Leghth :    92m
Depth  :    30m/14m

This is a more īadvancedī wreck (doesnīt say much compared to Australian), you can swim into the cargo bays and the steering hut. You can do real penetration on this dive but I didnīt. This wreck has more fish life than the Cement wreck and more to look at. A nice wreck to dive on for none wreck divers!

Name  :    USS Salute
Type  :    US Navy Minesweeper
Leghth:    184Ft
Depth :    33m/18m

This wreck is much more destroyed and lots harder to know what you are looking at than the two above. It probably have lots of good opportunities if you are a trained wreck diver but for a novice like me there where no good places to do any penetration. There where lots of stuff scattered about, the other wrecks where quite clean but this had lots of ammunition and stuff to find.

Name  :   MABINI PADRE
Type  :   Stern Trawler
Leghth:   80m
Depth :   35m

I never dove on the Blue water wreck. It lies a bit to deep to get any good bottom time on air without deco so we dove on the other three wrecks instead. But it was said to be very intact, and easy to penetrate.

Recommendation:

This is a hard one, no I wouldnīt go here again, but the reason for that is that I now know that I donīt want to dive only wrecks, I like a wreck as a distraction every now and then but not wrecks for 6 dives in a row. But if you, as I did then, want to try wreck diving this is a good place to start in.

Highlights:

Seeing my first wreck, an 80-meter wreck is something worth seeing.

Disappointments:

The visibility was not that great.

Related links:

My dive buddy's page describing the same trip
A page describing the wrecks, aquanauts

Dive sites visited:

Australian wreck*2, Cement wreck*2 and American wreck*2.

Last modified: August 3 1997
 visitors since June 15:Th, 1997.

Đ Stefan Sarin 1997-99