Diving Sabah? Dive Downbelow!

Our island team being wacky while waiting for the day’s guests to arrive at the island.

From left; Richard Swann (Downbelow Managing Director and resident PADI Platinum Course Director) with PADI Instructors Tim, Victor, Mel, Pablo and Strike.

These guys are always ready to make it a fun day for everyone, our guests and interns included, even on a gloomy day.

How long has it been since you have fun under the sun with the sand in-between your toes or the sea water in your ears? If you don’t even remember how it makes you feel then you need go out to the island as soon as possible and dive with us.

We have all kinds of dive courses, for the divers and non-divers too.

Don’t feel like getting wet? Then you can take a walk in the jungle behind our dive centre!

Contact us for any enquiries.

Every now and again a kind and generous client asks us to help them “give back”.

Some travellers feel that they take so much from their trips that they want to give back to the community whilst on holiday.

Two such travellers were Susan Copper Smith and her husband Scott Smith. They visited Sabah in May and bought with them bags full of goodies including children’s socks, toothbrushes, toothpaste, lots of crayons, books, letter games, some sweets and bubble tubs.

They asked us to donate the items to an orphanage of our choice and also donated MYR 450.00 to another needy cause. A few days ago Downbelow Director Joanne Swann and Office Manager Wan Raizah Matsah went to visit two Orphanages to say hi to the children and present Susan and Scotts donations.

Downbelow are very active in supporting local community projects. On 22nd June all 52 Orphans from the Darul Bakti Orphanage in Kota Belud will spend a day with us at our PADI 5 STAR IDC Centre snorkelling, learning about the underwater world and what they can do to protect it. There are 52 children living in the home so it will be a busy and fun day on the island.

Please contact us should you wish to know more about our community programs or if indeed you would like to “give back” whilst on holiday.

Last 8th June was World Ocean Day!

All of us at the Downbelow dive centre decided to raise awareness and mark this special day by hunting down and collecting just one piece of rubbish whilst scuba diving & consider how we may be able to reduce the trash that ends up in the oceans of the world.

Celebrate our amazing underwater world by considering how you can help preserve this awesome environment & also to spread awareness.

We encourage you to tag, blog, tweet & share your thoughts and ideas on how all of us can keep our environment healthier for everyone.

Great job to Mei Ling Chia and David for an outstanding effort in completing the PADI Underwater Photography Course with Downbelow instructor Tim.

Now you can go diving and will not have any excuses for not taking beautiful underwater photos of the underwater world and marine life which you can show to your family and friends.

A product that we highly recommend is the Canon G15 together with its underwater casing. They are available to buy at our dive shop or for rental at our PADI 5 Star IDC Dive Centre.

We are in the dark for a reason yesterday! 5th June 2013 is World Environment Day and to mark highlight and celebrate the wonderful day, we switched off half of our lights in the office.

The office team took some time out from their busy work to take a group picture.

Our team is aware of the importance in taking care of nature and that is why plastics and styrofoam are banned in the office. All of us either use recyclable containers or paper boxes for our food take-aways.

Printouts are also minimized to the max. We print only when needed and print double-sided to reduce paper use.

On the business side, we practice responsible tourism meaning using filtered water rather than bottled water, reducing the usage of plastic items by using recyclable bags, using responsible and local businesses for services, and reducing the ecological footprint of our office.

We also conduct regular Project Aware beach & underwater clean-ups, include marine & environmental conservation educational information within every dive and snorkel briefing whilst maintaining the element of fun learning. Do take time to read more about our conservation activities and photo gallery.