Exmouth Diving Centre Whale Shark report - Friday 16 April 2010

It's hard to keep reporting that we're having another excellent whale shark season here on the Ningaloo Reef, but we have to do it! Today we started our Whale Shark Adventure at Central Station for a reef dive & snorkel. Our friendly group of threadfin pearl perch were drifting idly in the surge, blue spotted stingrays knocked up big clouds of sand as they ate, small wrasse darted here and there chasing scraps. A big painted crayfish wiggled his antennae at us and when we stopped for a closer look we could see the stripes on his legs glowing bright neon blue back in his hole. An enormous loggerhead turtle dwarfed us all as he swam past, in no hurry at all.
WATER TEMP: 25C
VISIBILITY: 5-8m
CURRENT: mild
SURGE: moderate
DEPTH: 15m

We had three beautiful whale sharks today again. All three were relatively small - under 5.5m - and all of them were nice & slow so we had multiple fantastic drops with each of them. Two of them were also pretty curious and really seemed to engage the snorkelers. We find that happens so often with the smaller whale sharks and it makes being in the water with them even cooler!

To top our day off, we saw a big manta ray from the boat but he was zipping right along so we couldn't get in the water with him (I think most of us were too tired to try anyway but it was great to see him against the blue water!