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Another fabulous day here in Exmouth out on the Ningaloo Reef on our Whale Shark Adventure!
We started with a great snorkel on Central Station and saw all of our usual favourites: turtles, sharks, blue spotted stingrays, parrotfish, stars & stripes puffers, boxfish, convict surgeons, trevally, threadfin pearl perch...and MANTA RAYS! It doesn't matter how many times we see these guys, we always get excited!
Again today we had multiple whale sharks and multiple swims with each one. Mostly they were pretty slow and they let us stay for quite a while. One of them was gliding up and down from the surface to about 10 meters below us and back up again, over and over - clearly feeding and enjoying the abundant food source while totally ignoring us. We spent a lot of time in the water with the big guys today!
We also had more humpback whales as we cruised along the back of the reef. Their plumes of exhalations were enormous and hung in the air for ages. Wonderful!
A bit breezy this morning and a good sized swell coming in, so we did not do a scuba dive today but did have a great snorkel first thing. Always so much to see: turtles, rays, parrotfish, barracuda, white tip reef sharks, fusiliers, sweetlips. Great way to start our day!
The whale sharks today were wonderful again. We swam with three different whale sharks and the first two were 6-7m each. They got progressively slower as we swam with them...the first couple of drops on the first shark got our blood pumping a little bit! By our last drop on the third whale shark - by far the smallest one - it seemed the whale sharks had figured out that we weren't nearly as quick as they were and he was nice and slow, so we barely had to fin at all! What a fantastic day again!!
Today is the first day of 2011 with the humpback whales!! They were cruising north on their annual migration and we saw them in the morning as we headed south for our whale sharks. At the end of our day several groups of humpbacks accompanied us almost the whole way back. Beautiful to watch them with the backdrop of the Nor'West Cape behind them.
Central Station started our Whale Shark Adventure off with a bang today. Stacks of fish everywhere we looked, some reef sharks, a turtle and manta rays! Yay!! We love manta rays! We saw two swimming along the reef during our scuba dive and the snorkelers had another one that they were able to hang out with in the shallows.
WATER TEMP: 27C
VISIBILITY: 6-9m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: none
DEPTH: 17m
We found our first whale shark well before noon again today and swam our little hearts out. We had a BIG 8m whale shark who was awesome to watch: we were in the water looking towards where we knew he was but couldn't really see him and then this enormous mouth started to appear and all of a sudden BAM there was this huge fish!
It's a bit mind-blowing how something so large and something you know is right there can be virtually invisible like that.
Such a great day with our mantas, multiple whale sharks, great people, yummy food, fantastic snorkeling and postcard perfect weather!
Labyrinth was fantastic today! One of our groups saw two manta rays as they were coming down the mooring line - nice way to start a dive! There are almost solid walls of baitfish in several spots along the site and tuna, mackerel, trevally, coral trout and rankin cods were shooting through gobbling snacks and scattering the glittering fish everywhere for a few seconds before they reformed. And turtles. Too many to count and almost all of them very mellow and willing to let divers get up close for some great shots. One turtle swam with me for 15 minutes, it was amazing!
WATER TEMP: 27C
VISIBILITY: 15m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: very slight
DEPTH: 15m
Blizzard Ridge didn't have the schools of baitfish, but had huge schools of slightly larger (but still juvenile) snapper, fusiliers and sea perch. The fish were packed so densely you couldn't see another diver only 2m away! Wobbegongs, white tip reef sharks, olive sea snakes, goatfish, batfish, coral cods, pairs of lionfish, moray eels of all sizes and a showoff octopus putting on a very cool display - great time underwater!
WATER TEMP: 27C
VISIBILITY: 10-15m
CURRENT: none
SURGE: none
DEPTH: 15m
We saw a few dolphins on the way out and on the way back, too!
Another fabulous day out whale sharking here in Exmouth! No wind, calm seas, warm water and plenty of marine life!
We started with a dive at Central Station with turtles, white tip reef sharks, blue spotted lagoon rays, a big school of thread fin pearl perch, parrotfish, swarms of convict surgeons, a tawny nurse shark and tons more. The site was nice an active today!
DEPTH: 17m
TEMP: 27C
VIZ: 6-8
SURGE: none
CURRENT: very mild
We found our first whale shark pretty early and he was nice and slow to ease us into the day. We had multiple drops with him before finding two more sharks for more and more drops! One of our sharks was accompanied by about a zillion tiny to midsize fish swimming frantically under his chi in and all of the sharks had suckerfish under their bellies.
It was a very good day with beautiful conditions!
