Exmouth and Whale Sharks!

Exmouth is an interesting town. At first I was a bit off-put by the sheer numbers of tourists. It is most certainly a tourist town, and most of those tourists are international. That being said, I understand why all the tourists are here. It does make life difficult though, the infrastructure for all the tourists does not really exist. Exmouth has only 2 caravan parks and same with Coral Bay. There are 6 national park campsites, but they are booked out months in advance. Same with the caravan parks which pack you in like sardines and charge you for it. Luckily I stayed at the Equestrian club where they only allow people car camping (no caravans/rvs) but they have a maximum of 3 nights.

The ocean here is absolutely outstanding. There are a few places to snorkel from the coast which are lovely, but there area number of reef tours as well. They have the 'big 3' which are the macrofauna that occur here: whale sharks, humpback whales, and manta rays. Tour boats will take you to swim with these critters. I took a whale shark tour and it was absolutely amazing.

I woke up early and caught the bus where they drove us 45 minutes telling us about whale sharks. Whale sharks are indeed sharks, but they are filter feeders, eating only plankton they catch in their mouths. They are also the biggest fish in the ocean. Nigaloo reef, the reef outside of Exmouth, is a place where teenage male whale sharks come to congregate. Scientists still do not know why they come to this area, to spend their teenage years. The whale sharks in the area range from 5-10 meters long. On my tour we swam with 3 (one quite far, but 2 very close).

The tour began getting us ferried about to our sailboat where we quickly headed straight out to the reef for our first snorkel. We spent 40 minutes or so swimming around looking at the reefs. Since this area is subtropical, I learned that the reef here is primarily brown and tan in color, although there were some that were purple and brilliant blue. The corals are generally more tolerant hard corals as opposed to the soft corals of the tropics. There were brain corals, that were round and wrinkly, staghorn corals that looked like antlers with bright blue tips, some that looked like purple ice crean cones (hollow on the inside), and many more varieties. It's much less brilliant that the corals of the great barrier reef, but still magnificent and utterly different. There were many sizes and varieties of fish small blue and yellow fish, brown and yellow pufferfish, brilliantly colored parrot fish some a few feet long and some the size of my hand, angel fish, and butterfly fish, and many others I couldn't name. 

We made our way back for a quick snack on the boat and learned about the plan for our whale shark swimming. A spotter plane took-off nearby to spot whale sharks for us and we saw it cruising around while we received our instructions. Since whale sharks may dive deep quickly and go out of sight we needed to be prepared for our swim. We were separated into two groups for the swim. Our spotter would swim ahead and find the whale shark, she would indicate the direction of travel of the shark and its depth with her hands and we would all leap in the water and line up behind our guide in a line so we would be in parallel with the whale shark. They would yell to put your heads under and 3 meters in front of us was the whale shark. We were instructed to watch the shark until its fin reached us and then we were free to swim staying 3 meters from the body of the shark but only a few feet from its fins. It was amazing. I swam for a few minutes keeping pace with the amazing fish. I was in absolute awe. I cannot described the magic of swimming alongside these incredible creatures. It was just so beautiful. 

We got 3 swims with the whale sharks, although the third it dove deep and I only got a quick glimpse of it as it disappeared into the deep blue below us. While waiting to get picked up by our boat we put our head under the water and you could hear the calls of the humpback whales nearby. 

After our swims we took a quick break resting on the deck of the boat with snacks and watched the humpback whales breaching, tail smacking, and swimming nearby. On the tour we saw 14-15 pods of whales with 2-10 whales in each pod. Some just cruised quickly by our boat, while others showed off with leaps and tail wags. We ate lunch while watching these incredible creatures before heading to the reef for another snorkel. We saw more fish in these line reefs that form long tunnels from the currents. I dove down and shot through the tunnels when the waves changed directions, being pulled along with the fish. We had to get our early to let a humpback mother and her small calf swim by, but that too was a lovely experience. 

We celebrated with bubbly on our sail back towards land. It was a phenomenal experience.