Jaswinder Kaur New Straits Times 17 Feb 09;
Pulau Sipadan is one of 261 nominees in the New7Wonders of Nature online campaign, alongside Ko Phi Phi in Thailand, the Maldives, the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls on the Canada-United States border and Australia's Great Barrier Reef. A panel of experts will reduce the list to 21 on July 21. To vote for Sipadan, log on to www.new7wonders.com/nature
A QUARTER of a century ago, Pulau Sipadan was a sleepy island shaded by coconut trees. Very few divers had ventured into its blue-green waters in the Celebes Sea to discover the wonders of its marine life.
Sipadan found itself on the world stage when renowned ocean adventurer Jacques Cousteau showcased what it had to offer in a film entitled Ghost of the Sea Turtles, describing it as an "untouched piece of art".
By 1990, small wooden resorts began appearing on the beaches of Sipadan, which is about the size of 30 football fields.
Just a 90-minute speedboat ride from Sabah's east coast town of Semporna, divers found themselves swimming with fish in almost every imaginable colour, and exploring a diversity of corals only seen at top dive sites.
Stories started appearing in special interest magazines around the world, highlighting another interesting fact -- shaped something like a mushroom, Sipadan is an oceanic island formed by corals that grew on top of an extinct undersea volcano rising 600 metres from the sea bed.
Gazetted as a bird sanctuary under the Land Ordinance during British rule in 1933, it was pushed once again into the world's focus nine years ago. But this time for the wrong reasons.
Gunmen kidnapped 21 people, Malaysians and foreign tourists, and took them to the southern Philippines. All were released in stages within a year.
Despite the setback, divers continued to come and Sabah received the best news ever two years later when the International Court of Justice at the Hague ruled that Sipadan and nearby Ligitan belonged to Malaysia, in a 16-1 majority verdict over Indonesia.
By September 2003, a joint state and federal committee on the management and supervision of Sipadan and Ligitan was established. This was followed with a directive to the five dive operators to vacate the island by Dec 31, 2004.
The move was made not only for security reasons, but also to protect the island's barracudas, large schools of trevally, turtles, coral gardens and macro-life such as mantis shrimps.
In the last four years, a maximum of 120 day-trippers have been allowed to dive at Sipadan each day.
Almost three years ago, a barge laden with construction material scraped a portion of corals, leading to a huge outcry in the diving fraternity.
Though the headlines then were alarming, with one screaming "Sipadan reefs probably lost forever", scientist Dr Elizabeth Wood, who first visited the island in its pre-diving era, said Storm Greg in 1996 damaged some shallow water reefs while the increase in water temperature had contributed to coral bleaching.
An officer from the British-based Marine Conservation Society said reefs close to the jetty had suffered from years of pressure from divers and boats, while Marine Research Foundation director Dr Nicolas Pilcher said reports on the "barge incident" were exaggerated, pointing out that schools of bumphead parrotfish that roam over reefs do similar damage.
Despite some bumps on the road, Sipadan is today still on the "must-do" list for divers.
