Swimming with whale sharks!

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April 22: Denham to Coral Bay (Mileage: 1777 km)

April 23: Coral Bay - Whale Shark tour

Spent the morning driving up from Denham to Monkey Mia to see the dolphin feeding.  Dolphins come in 3x per day to get fed by local park rangers, which is (to be honest) pretty much as it sounds.  Beautiful area, but you can see dolphin feedings at any aquarium, and they also do tricks there.  Very commercial, but quite a nice area to go see (worth the 15 min drive from Denham).

On the way back to the major highway we stopped in at Eagle Bluff, which is another big lookout point over the ocean.  Beautiful point, and you can see well into the crystal-clear water ~100m below.  Not much sea life in there that day, but we saw tons of massive fish swimming around when we walked around the corner to find a shady spot overlooking the ocean.

Final stop before the highway was another major bomb.  Stopped to see the Stromatolites, that are some sort of organism that grows only in a couple of spots in the world.  They are something like 3-4B years old (yes, billion!), so seen as quite a cool concept in the scientific community.  Not so for us.  Really looked like a bunch of growths in the ocean, and definitely not worth the 5 minute drive off the highway...  Skip it.

Highway drive to Coral Bay was uneventful, with the most exciting thing being the sign that read "Limited water for the next 632 km"!  Ironically, it was followed up by floodways almost every km for the duration of the drive...  Drivers started to become more friendly here, and probably 75% of cars' drivers do the Outback wave (raise index finger) as you pass them.

Coral Bay is a pretty small little coastal town of about 100 people, that only really exists for swimming with whale sharks and manta rays, and as a school holiday point for WA Aussies for 2 weeks each year.  Tiny little resort town that is operated only on generated power.  Nice area though, and probably one of the first times in my life that I went for a swim in the ocean at 5 pm on an Autumn evening!

Mary and I split for the first time on the trip, since she had seen whale sharks and mantas the previous weekend before meeting me on the trip.  I went on an all-day whale shark tour.  Quite a cool concept.  There are three boats that go out and they share a spotter plane that flies around looking for the migrating whales and then you jump out into the water to go for a swim with them!  Bit of organized chaos, since each boat takes turns, and you get about 5 mins per round swimming with the sharks.

For those of you who are scared (Mum?), whale sharks are sharks, but do not pose any threat to humans (unless of course you get too close to their tails...)  They eat little sea life, and can grow up to 18 m long.

We actually had a long day on the boat, and ended up just doing a lot of snorkeling around the reef and sight-seeing around the reef for a long time, since no sharks were spotted early on in the trip.  Ended up snorkeling in a "cleaning area", where reef sharks go to get their teeth cleaned by smaller little fish.  Sounds like a joke, but it is real - the little ones go into their mouths and eat the batceria off the sharks teeth.  Saw several sharks up to about a meter and a half long, and even did some free-diving to get down close to them.  I have always heard that reef sharks are not dangerous to humans, but after most people had left, the guide told us that the ones we saw would have been a lot more dangerous on the open seas...  Next we went to a turtle sanctuary and saw several turtles swimming around, up to ~3/4m big!

Waited until lunch to get a call that a whale shark had been spotted, but by the time we got there it was gone.  We ended up wandering around aimlessly for several hours in the boat, until almost the time to turn around and go back, when they finally spotted another one.  Long story short, we had to chase it around and prep on board to jump into the water and swim along side it.  Only a baby at ~2.5 m long, but I got to swim alongside it for ~5 mins, probably about 2 m away from the side of it.  Beautiful creatures - white bellies, dark upper bodies, spots all over, and huge square-shaped mouths.  Several smaller fish swam around it looking for food and protection.  Swimmers are supposed to maintain a greater distance than I did, mostly because the thing kept turning and swimming at me!  Was a very cool experience... 

The first call had interrupted our lunch plans, so we finally got back to calm waters and had lunch at like 4:30 pm, which meant all of us were starving and exhausted.  Met up with Mary afterwards, and we basically grabbed a beer and then hit the sack pretty early that night...  We did manage to see several shooting stars in the sky over the two nights we were there though - the sky is amazingly clear and starry in this part of the world.