Pom Pom Island
People point at a map of Sabah and assume everything floating in the Celebes Sea is the same kind of rock. It isn't. You can spend your surface intervals on a crowded wooden deck above a busy boat channel or you can spend them walking a two-kilometre ring of sand that feels detached from the mainland rush. Pom Pom sits out on the northeastern fringe where the heavy boat traffic fades to nothing. It is the choice you make when Sipadan is on your list but silence is the actual priority.
Table of Contents
- The geography of distance
- The hatchery and the night shift
- The sea wall compromise
- Rebuilding the house reef
- The outer drop-offs
- The Sipadan boat run
The geography of distance
Distance filters out the casual day-trippers. The transit to Pom Pom requires a drive from Tawau to Semporna followed by a 45-minute speedboat ride across open water. The journey leaves the inner-reef chaos behind. The island itself is a flat disc of coral sand measuring 2.3 kilometres around. It stays below two metres above the high tide line. You can walk the whole perimeter in twenty minutes if you ignore the midday heat.
The resort spreads its rooms across three distinct tiers. Water villas stand on timber stilts along a 300-metre boardwalk jutting over the sea. Beach villas sit on the shoreline. Garden units hide back in the tropical foliage. Every room shares a uniform footprint of roughly 85 square metres. Living on a remote sand cay involves hard operational realities. The resort runs off the grid. Power management dictates the rhythm of daily life. The engineers institute two scheduled daily power outages to manage the generator load. The background hum of the island dies. The air conditioning stops. The ceiling fan slows to a halt. The digital world vanishes because there is no WiFi in the guest villas. The ambient cellular signal is sporadic at best. I watch guests arrive and stare at their phones in a panic before abandoning them in the room safe on day two. It forces a physical disconnection that a certain kind of traveller pays good money for.
Families appreciate this geography. The four-kilometre fringing reef creates calm shallow lagoons independent of the dive boats. You can walk out of your room and snorkel right off the sand.
The hatchery and the night shift
Pom Pom keeps the turtle conservation team busy. Green turtles drag themselves out of the sea year-round to bury their eggs; hawksbills have a shorter nesting season. The greens hit their peak between May and September. The island produces high volumes of hatchlings. Researchers recorded 429 green turtle nests yielding nearly 38,000 eggs against a mere 58 nests from the critically endangered hawksbill over an eight-year stretch. The sand occasionally throws up a biological anomaly. Researchers excavating a nest in 2018 found a clutch that produced 30 healthy albino green turtle hatchlings with no dark pigment.
A beach full of eggs attracts predators. Monitor lizards are excellent diggers. The resort conservation team walks the high tide line every night in the dark. They wait for a female to finish laying. Then they excavate the clutch and carry it to one of two secure hatcheries. These are 35-plot sandboxes guarded against the lizards. Keeping the hatcheries healthy is serious work. The team digs out all the sand every year and replaces it. Old sand traps bacteria and invasive roots that suffocate the eggs. The hatcheries at Pom Pom have recorded emergence rates near eighty per cent.
The resort uses a phone alert group to let guests know what is happening at the hatchery. A message that a nest is moving can interrupt your dinner. The team releases the hatchlings at sunrise or sunset. They time the release to get the turtles past the daytime marine birds. The sand dictates the schedule. If a nest boils while you are standing there it is just your lucky day.
The sea wall compromise
Islands made of sand are fluid objects. The ocean takes pieces away and deposits them somewhere else. The northeast corner of Pom Pom suffers severe coastal erosion. The Celebes Sea pulls the beach into the channel. Wikipedia records the resort's construction of a heavy structural sea wall along the high tide line to hold the real estate together and save the trees. It is a harsh concrete line against a soft ocean.
Turtles do not understand coastal engineering. Sometimes a female comes ashore at two in the morning and hits the rock or the exposed roots where a gentle slope used to be. She tests the barrier with a flipper. She abandons the attempt and turns back to the water. It is a brutal thing to watch. It shows what it takes to keep a human footprint on a shifting cay.
Rebuilding the house reef
The shallow water here is a landscape of human intervention. Blast fishing used to be the standard way to catch dinner in these islands. The dynamite shattered the delicate branching corals and left behind a flat expanse of loose rubble. Natural recovery is impossible on a shattered slope. Settling coral polyps get crushed when the rocks roll in the swell.
The Tropical Research and Conservation Centre operates on the western flank to fix the damage. They drop interlocking steel frames called Reef Stars onto the rubble. They use concrete modules and thousands of recycled glass bottles to lock the loose pieces in place. They have planted over 75,000 coral fragments on this artificial grid. The metal holds the slope still long enough for the reef to fuse. The new angles give the weird animals somewhere to hide. Ghost pipefish hover vertically inside the steel frames. Blue-ringed octopuses hunt in the glass bottles.
The main attraction is Mandarin Heaven. Asia Dive Holidays describes it as a shallow patch of staghorn coral in 5 to 15 metres of water right off the jetty. Resident mandarinfish hide in the branches all day. At dusk they engage in an elaborate mating ritual. They rise into the water column in synchronised pairs to spawn. You kneel in the sand and wait for the light to die.
The dive operation itself runs a tight ship to protect the restoration work. Staff carry the cylinders and set up the regulators on the boat. Self-diving on the house reef is forbidden. Morning dives must be scheduled by eight the night before. Certified divers who have not logged a drop in two years must complete a Scuba Review before boarding the boat. It is a strict system designed to keep divers safe and the fragile corals intact.
The outer drop-offs
The gentle muck diving ends where the perimeter drops off. Out on the rocks you feel the Celebes Sea put its shoulder into the dive. Sites like Lobster Wall start at 10 metres and fall vertically past 40. The current runs hard out here. You ride the drift and let the ocean do the work. Deep crevices in the rock face hold giant spiny lobsters.
The resort's dive-site notes describe Northern Valley as a deep dive with strong currents. Current means food. Food means large gorgonian sea fans. Guides navigate to the fan first and the animal second. I look for pygmy seahorses among the pink branches. The resort's dive-site notes describe green turtles resting on the sloping reefs below the wall.
The Sipadan boat run
Getting to Sipadan from the outer islands requires exact logistics. The marine reserve sits a long way south. Sabah Parks manages the reef tightly. They issue a daily limit of permits in a single pool shared by divers and snorkellers. Night diving is completely banned. The island shuts down every November to give the reef a break.
The speedboat ride from Pom Pom is a long run across open water. The transit eats a large hole in the morning schedule. Because you have a long return journey before the 4pm closure the boats from here only fit two dives on the Sipadan wall. We treat this as a specific fit for a specific diver. You get a quiet island to sleep on and two spectacular drops on the famous drop-off. If your entire goal is three daily dives at Sipadan then a shorter boat ride makes more sense. Mabul and Kapalai sit right on the border and their operations run three tanks a day.
Pom Pom offers a specific kind of isolation. You trade the crowded dive-camp atmosphere for a sand cay that shuts down after dinner. Read our guide to Semporna dive sites to see the regional map or look at the Mabul resorts if you want the three-dive logistics. Send us your dates and your group size and we will put the right boat under you.