The turtle is the main treasure of Sipadan

What started as a perfectly relaxed and wholesome dive at Sipadan’s White Tip Alley quickly took a romantic turn towards amor. I was diving with WWF photographers Jürgen and Stella Freund; together we were swimming at a depth of five metres, paying token attention to the various turtles that swam our way.

Suddenly, a massive male green turtle careened at high speed in front of us towards a slightly bigger female, almost slamming into her. A second male joined the fray, but soon gave up and swam away, as if in deference to the fellow who got there first. Suitor #1 wasn’t in the clear yet though, as he seemed to be faced with an unwilling female, but he wasn’t going to give up easily. The suitor nipped, chased, and embraced her with his flippers. He soon swam away in mock disinterest but turned again and zoomed back like a torpedo, hell-bent on exhausting her. After 30 minutes the female turtle eased away into the blue with the unrelenting male still in pursuit, leaving us behind wondering if he would eventually win her over.

The encounter was just one of the highlights of a week-long dive trip to Sipadan, the famed island bounded by the Sulu and Sulawesi Seas at the south-eastern end of Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo. Sipadan, which rises like a mushroom from a deep abyss, has been called “the island of the turtles,” and with good reason: These enigmatic “ambassadors of the sea” are regular visitors, if not seasonal residents of these parts.

“The turtle is the main treasure of Sipadan,” says David Shaw, a dive instructor at the Sipadan Mabul Resort on Sipadan’s neighbouring Mabul Island. “For us, of course, they’re just ordinary here. But they are what people come to see.” Shaw, a certified cave diving instructor, often takes guests on guided tours of the famed Turtle Tomb under Sipadan, a series of underwater caverns where many sea turtles perish, supposedly because they get lost and drown. It’s a theory Shaw doesn’t buy. “These animals can find their way back to the islands where they were born – how could they get lost inside a cave?” he says. “I think old and sick turtles come because they know they’re going to die here.” It’s an anthropocentric notion, but such is the effect of these charismatic animals on our collective imagination.