Cement Wreck

She stands upright on hard sand with nothing else around her, so the descent lands on structure rather than a search for it. The wreck is dived in tiers: the masts reach to within about 8 m of the surface at low tide, the wheelhouse roof sits at 14 m, the main deck runs at 19 to 22 m, and the sand alongside the hull is at 30 to 32 m. That spread is what makes her work for a mixed group. She is 92 m long with a 15 m beam, more ship than one dive covers, so a circuit usually takes a section of deck and then drops down one side.

From the wheelhouse the cargo deck runs away into the haze, and the way she sits — upright, open, lit from above — makes her the easiest of the Labuan wrecks to pass through. Operators use her for wreck-diving training, and the Brunei centre that dives this group rates her and the Australian Wreck as the safest to enter. Holds, accommodation and the engine room beyond them are open to trained divers, but the funnel came down in the late 1990s and storms in 2002 tore out superstructure panelling, so she is less solid than she looks.

The upper half carries a garden of soft and hard corals, sponges, feather stars and anemones, which is why this is the wreck people here bring a camera to. Schools of small barracuda patrol the masts, batfish come to divers, and trevally, grouper, lionfish, pufferfish and octopus work the length of the hull. Nudibranchs and smaller critters live in the growth on the plating, turtles pass through, and whale sharks turn up over the wreck occasionally, though sightings are rare.

The logistics are the awkward part. Labuan has no dive centre, so the day is run from Brunei or from Sabah, roughly half an hour by boat out to the wreck off Kuraman Island, and visibility is usually 5 to 20 m with little current to speak of. The site is also legally protected: Labuan's wrecks were gazetted as a protected zone in 2011 under the National Heritage Act 2005, so everything on her, cargo included, stays where it is.