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Published: November 6th 2009
The mating chain
Photo by Amber CookDay 190 - Coral Bay
A quick birthday shout out to young Rhys Lewis! Happy Birthday Rhys, we hope you have a lovely day! Today’s the day we’re hoping to swim with Manta Rays! We were up bright and early this morning ready for our big day out on the ocean waves! Everyone is very excited and Zoe is keen that we arrive on time! With two minutes to go before the clock strikes quarter past eight, the time we should be outside the tour shop, we leave the caravan park! No drama, it’s only just across the road and when we get there we realise we have plenty of time.
There’s a short briefing in the shop introducing us to the crew and giving us an outline of the day. Then we’re shuttled down to the jetty to meet our boat and captain. It’s only a small vessel at 16 metres but it’s comfortable, has a shaded deck and there’s plenty of room for the 18 people on board.
It’s a beautiful slow and steady sail out of the harbour into the ocean. We’ve got the best day, weather wise, that they’ve had here for over
three months as it’s so still and calm.
Not long into the trip we’re already spotting dolphins around the boat, there are two small dolphins so it suggests a family outing. Beautiful! Our captain is very careful to manoeuvre the boat in such a way that we’re not chasing them down as we all seem to be travelling in the same direction!
There’s a small period of time when we’re going further out to sea in the hope of finding some whales to look at. It’s actually just nice to be relaxed on board the deck of the boat, the fact that we don’t find any whales doesn’t seem to bother any of us at all! The crew talk about getting the sea plane up to help us spot whales and / or manta rays. Whichever the find first we’ll head out for. Manta Rays it is and we whizz into our wet suits to join them in the water when we’re close by.
We’re given a briefing by the crew about how we should act when we’re in the water with the manta rays, these huge creatures need time to become settled with humans close by
and therefore we’re asked not to dive down to them until we’re given the ok. We’re also asked not to jump into the water from the back of the boat but to enter as quietly as we can.
Everyone is clambering into their wetsuits now which is a hoot in itself when you’re not used to wearing them! What with the flippers and then snorkelling goggles we make an amusing bunch to look at!
We’re split into two groups and the Reeves are in the first bunch to go out to swim with the manta rays. Our crew have been great this morning, the only slip up so far is when the hurried initial prompt is given for the first group to get in the water and then as people start jumping they’re yelled at to go in quietly! I laughed out loud, I had to, it was funny! You can’t remind people not to do something when they’re already half way through a physical movement like entering water!!! That never works!
Our group queued up on the back of the boat, ready to sit down on the given command and enter the water quietly - now
we’d seen what not to do! It went beautifully, like clock work and we’re soon swimming towards the Manta Ray. When we got in the water there was a huge (no exaggeration, it was huge) Bull Ray just below us so that made us swim that little bit faster! We caught sight of the Manta Rays really easily and as we had no crew with us we swam with them on our own for quite a long time. The size of the Bull Ray has now paled into insignificance, Manta Rays are the king of the rays, they are enormous, absolutely enormous. The Manta’s are at a cleaning station where they have an army of fish doing just that, cleaning them! It’s beautiful to watch as they glide through the water, we’ve never seen anything like this before. There was also a reef shark hanging around which was great to see too.
It’s soon time to swap over with the other group so we swim back towards the boat and clamber back in. We’re all in awe of what we’ve seen, it’s just amazing.
When it was our turn again we were completely blown away by the display
the Manta Rays put on for us, as were most of the crew! We seemed to be in the middle of their mating chain where there were a couple of females with 5 males in tow at one time. They swam in between our group and then starting diving and gliding over the top of one another. There was a black bellied manta ray here too. It was all stunning, breathtaking and despite the effort required to keep up with them initially, once we were with them they seemed to love it or at least weren’t the slightest bit bothered by us watching. We literally had to lift our feet for fear of knocking them with our flippers they were so close to us and a manta ray swimming head on towards you is more un-nerving than a shark!
What an amazing experience. It will take us days to stop going on about this!!
Back on board we all chatted about what we’d seen and were even more delighted to hear that a couple of the crew that have worked here for a very long time have only seen that activity once before! How lucky were we to
pick today to come on the tour.
Good on you Manta Rays!
While the crew were preparing lunch we were whisked out to a snorkel site which was another great experience. The wetsuits make a huge difference to the length of time you can hack it in the water, it’s much more comfortable then being in our swimmers and a t-shirt.
I’m in the water from the off so get separated from the others but we think we pretty much see the same things and explore the area in full. We were even the last group to come back on board even though we knew lunch would be waiting and lets face it, that’s how Mr Howells usually gets his money back!
What a feast we were treated too and things were so laid back, it was a really nice atmosphere and the food was very tasty and well presented.
After lunch we still had enough time for another snorkel so sped in the boat to the next spot. There was a bit of a rush around to find Kenny’s wetsuit which he’d taken off for lunch but then Simone had us in hysterics when she
cried out “Has anyone seen my wetsuit?” She was of course wearing it at the time!!
This next snorkel site was different again and the coral was much deeper in parts so you needed to duck dive a fair bit to get the best out of it. There were plenty of turtles here, the first only had one back flipper but it didn’t seem to slow him down at all. We really had to go some to keep up with him. We’d been using our faithful waterproof camera bag since Cairns but today of all days it sprang a leak. The tiniest of pin pricks but it was enough to let salt water in although luckily the camera is still operational so we won’t have lost any of the photographs! Phew! Good job it wasn’t the Canon!
We spent some time encouraging Beth to come for a snorkel with us all and we were really chuffed when she did have a go. Well done Beth, she’s only five but she’s already done an open water snorkel, awesome!
The journey back on the boat was lovely and we chatted on the front deck with everyone and had a
group photo taken. We’d all got chatting to a lovely family, Bergot, Marco and daughters Tanika and Khala from the Dandenong Ranges so all decided to go and check out the pub in readiness for tomorrow’s big race - the Melbourne Cup.
Before we left we were delighted to realise that we could purchase a CD copy of all the photos taken by crew member Amber Cook from today. She gave us a slide show and they are just awesome, as you can see! Had we realised that we could purchase the whole lot we would have had fair more group photos done in the water but we were still pleased with what we got. Actually, fair play to Amber because we were quite open in asking if she minded us purchasing one CD between our two groups then copying it for the other family. She was fantastic and didn’t mind at all and had no objections to us using them on the blog either - so here they are! Just shows you what a competent diver with a decent underwater camera and lens (it’s the lens that makes the difference) can do!
Over at the pub we
had a few drinks to acquaint ourselves and booked a table for the big day then headed back to camp for a curry Simone had been cooking through the day in the Dream Pot. Awesome isn’t it when you can spend all day larking around in the ocean while dinner is cooking!
The evening went with a swing and the guitars came out just before 10pm for only a couple of songs because the camp ground has a curfew of 10pm. We’d left it a bit late! Mark is a fantastic entertainer and as such he’s not very quiet, it’s difficult to play the guitar quietly and it’s even more difficult to sing and laugh quietly. Unfortunately we had a neighbour with a sense of humour failure who took exception to Mark’s singing by first turning up his TV as loud as it would go then yelling out “Get a voice mate, don’t give up your day job” which prompted the reply “Too late” from Mark as he hasn’t had a day job other than being a fantastic house husband and wonderful role model for the kids for the past few years.
We went a few minutes past
curfew unfortunately and we had a visit from the security guard who also didn’t have a sense of humour. I would just like to say at this point that we were not ridiculously drunk, falling around the place or swearing. We were just sitting around listening to a guy singing and playing guitar and we were laughing quite a bit. It also should be said that we were doing all this just before and only slightly past the curfew. It wasn’t nearing midnight or two in the morning, it was just gone 10pm. It was all a bit over the top but like reasonably good citizens we packed away our things and took ourselves to bed (at 10.15pm) wishing we were still in a free camp spot next to the ocean where nobody would complain about us having too much fun.
Ironically we will all be at the office tomorrow morning asking to book in for yet another night, we’ll just have to start the singing earlier!
Dar and Sar
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Jan Kettle
non-member comment
Remarkable!
What a fantastic experience to have and brilliant photos too! The Coral Bay/Exmouth area is just so special and it's pretty much top of our list of places to go back to (but don't tell everyone how wonderful it is there!). Mum K xxx