Brunei's Offshore Wrecks

• Brunei's Sunken Treasures, DivePhotoGuide
• USS Salute (AM-294), Wikipedia
• Labuan Diving Festival - Big 4 Wreck Dive, Tourism Malaysia
• Labuan shipwrecks offer deep dive into history, biodiversity, Free Malaysia Today
• Dive Sites in Brunei, Poni Divers
• Wreck Diving Brunei - Dive Sites Review, Underwater Clicks
• Best Scuba Diving in Brunei, Scuba Diver Life
• Scuba Diving Guide To Brunei, TRVLGUIDES
• Sea water temperature Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, SeaTemperature.info
• Poni Divers, Brunei Tourism (official site)

Note on the data: Confidence is low, deliberately. Three things are thin. First, current operator availability: Poni Divers (Serasa/Muara) is listed by Brunei Tourism and is the operator every source names, alongside the Brunei Sub Aqua Diving Club, but this brief did not confirm a live 2026 schedule, prices or minimum-numbers policy from the operator directly — anyone planning a trip should contact them before booking flights. Second, dive-site coordinates are approximate positions derived from published descriptions ("23km southwest of Labuan", "35km offshore", boat-run times from Serasa), not surveyed GPS; the only precise position here is USS Salute's, from Wikipedia at 5 deg 8 min N, 115 deg 5 min E. Third, jurisdiction: the Cement and Blue Water wrecks lie in Malaysian waters off Labuan and are usually dived from the Labuan side, so treating them as Brunei sites is a convention of the dive literature rather than a legal fact; this brief says so rather than glossing it. The Australian Wreck's identity as SS De Klerk / Imaji Maru is well corroborated (DivePhotoGuide, Malaysian tourism and press coverage, dive literature), and the misidentification story — that she was thought to have been sunk by Australian aircraft — is the origin of the name; sources differ on whether she was built in 1900 or 1909 and on her exact length (85-94m), so both ranges are noted rather than picked. Casualty figures for Imaji Maru (commonly cited as 339 prisoners, forced labourers and comfort women) come from secondary sources, not an archival record. Prices are indicative from a secondary guide. Season (calm March-October, northeast monsoon November-February) is consistent across multiple independent write-ups but is not sourced to a meteorological authority. Water temperature is from a sea-temperature aggregator, not a moored buoy. Water temperature: Effectively flat year-round: published monthly surface averages for Bandar Seri Begawan run 28.0-30.2C, with recorded monthly extremes of about 26.7-31.3C, and the min/max here are rounded from those extremes rather than a real seasonal swing. February is marginally the coolest month and May-June the warmest. A 3mm suit is enough for most divers; a shorty works, though repetitive 30m wreck dives leave some people wanting more. Access: Access is genuinely easy and the difficulty is booking, not travelling. Brunei International (BWN) to the dive base at Serasa/Muara is roughly 25-30km, about 30 minutes by road, with no domestic flight needed; Brunei is also reachable overland by bus from Miri or Kota Kinabalu. Boat rides to the wrecks are short open-water hops from Serasa: about 25 minutes to the Australian Wreck, 30 minutes to the American Wreck and the Dolphin 88, 45 minutes to the oil-rig structures, and around an hour or more to the Blue Water Wreck, which lies furthest offshore. Sea state, not distance, is what stops trips. Independently verified 2026-08-28. All three wreck identities CONFIRMED against sources other than those cited: USS Salute (AM-294) via DANFS — mined 15:16 on 8 June 1945, six killed and three missing, broken in half; SS De Klerk / Imaji Maru — scuttled at Tanjong Priok March 1942, refloated by the Japanese, mined 16 September 1944 carrying 162 troops and 1,048 workers with 339 dead, and the 'Australian' name confirmed as an RAAF misattribution; MV Tung Hwang aground on Samarang Bank 25 September 1980 with no lives lost. The entry gets these right where parts of the dive literature do not. The 'comfort women' element of the De Klerk story appears only in dive literature, not archival sources, which is why the text says prisoners and forced labourers. Corrections applied: the Malaysian-waters caveat now covers all four wrecks rather than two (Labuan tourism markets them as its 'Big 4'), bestMonths moved to March-June with July-August identified as the weaker months, the monsoon extended to November-March, and the Cement Wreck's profile corrected to a ~19m superstructure over a ~30m seabed. Confidence raised from low to medium: Poni Divers is verifiably trading in 2026 (Brunei Tourism listing, 2026 reviews, multiple agency affiliations), and the same wrecks are reliably bookable from Labuan.