Video Contest – January 2021

Description: Pulau Kapalai, a remote sandbank with a Hotel built on it. Plus a wonderful (artificial) reef, no less than a 5 minute boat ride from the diving paradise Mabul away. Here lies an adventurous and diverse marine habitat that will leave your craving for new and exciting sea creatures more than satisfied. The part which is artificial reef at Kapalai is rather grand. There are lots of different components such as buildings, frames in the form houses and boats, attracting differing kinds of critters. The reef fish have worked out that divers cannot get inside these structures, so many, like the sweetlips will hang in there in the same way they would under a ledge or in a crevice. And just because Kapalai is an artificial reef, doesn’t mean that you won’t find all the regular reef critters. Suitable for divers of all levels, Kapalai reef consists of a sloping reef descending down to around 15m and onto a sandy bottom (22m) where you can find an array of nudis, devil scorpion fish, garden eels, octopus, barracuda, sweetlips, batfish and snapper schools, giant groupers and the elusive and mystifying ornate ghost pipefish. Found a small black moray eel with a red head there which I wasn’t able to ID for sure. An educated guess was it’s a juvenile red-faced moray. But please let us know if you know the exact species. After diving all of the artificial reef one usually returns back to the natural reef to finish off the dive with more stunning creatures such as cuttlefish, leaf scorpion fish, painted frog fish, giant moray eels, mandarin fish, white banded pipefish, hairy squat lobsters, peacock mantis shrimp and loads of special nudis and critters (An extra video featuring only the fish of Kapalai can be watched here https://youtu.be/Rm62xHIRbro).