Whale Shark report - Thursday 18 June 2009

Another magnificent day whale sharking!  We began our day by getting ready for a dive, but then got distracted by a very young humpback whale - he was still grey - doing huge leaps and splashes a little further up the coast.  So we cruised up to watch him cavort for 30 minutes before he decided he'd had enough and just starting swimming peacefully.  He was awesome to watch.

We decided to head back down south and do the dive later in the afternoon so we could start looking for whale sharks before the planes got in the air. Along the coast we saw lots of turtles, more humpback whales then a group of manta rays. Of course we had to stop and have a snorkel with this active group of four manta rays circling and weaving their way through a food rich lane. After the mantas, we resumed looking for whale sharks with two people up on the roof of the boat to get a better vantage point.

Our skipper, Craig, extended his winning streak of finding whale sharks before the plane does and we had already had two good swims before the first plane reported spotting more sharks further south. We ended up swimming with eight different whale sharks today, including two with tags. One of the tagged sharks was our old friend, Stumpy - he was by far the mellowest of all the sharks today and swam so slowly that we were able to change sides easily and even stop to have a little chat about how awesome he was without getting left behind!

After swimming our hearts out with so many whale sharks, we headed back north along the coast to do our dive. There were quite a few whales keeping us entertained on the drive back but none were as exuberant as the first one!

Central Station was suffering from the huge swell that's currently around so the visibility was lower than it has been, but there was a lot of fish action. Sometimes we think the predators like the lower visibility for hunting! The best part of the dive was at the very end when we were joined by a very friendly manta ray who swept around and over us for more than five minutes. He'd glide in so close we could feel the water rolling off his wings. Gorgeous!
WATER TEMP: 24C
VISIBILITY: 5-8m
CURRENT: slight
SURGE: slight
DEPTH: 16m

Here's a little video of one of our whale sharks taken on the FlipVideo camera that we have for hire. Pretty awesome for a camera smaller than a deck of cards! Ask us how you can hire this or one of our other cameras for your tours!