A fish Called Marv

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We are now a little further up the coast from Shark Bay where we swam with the dolphins at a place called Coral Bay. It is right on the Ningaloo Reef. At first we were a little disappointed with the snorkelling as much of the coral is dead. Not because of man-made reasons as you might expect, but because there was a coral spawn about five years ago which went horribly wrong, and ended up actually killing the coral! The locals say it is actually very good for the coral in the long run - I am not convinced!

Despite this, Ningaloo Reef is pretty amazing for its animal life. On a single snorkel yesterday, in the space of an hour, we saw two octopus, a sea snake, a turtle, many rays, and lots of big fish, bigger than anything we have ever seen in SE Asia.

This morning, however, we encountered the king of all fish. This thing was huge - as big as Scott but fatter! It was so big that we thought it was a shark at first. We actually saw it as we were walking along the beach with three other people from our hostel. It started off as a dark shadow gliding along in the shallows, and slowly turned into a shark, and then when it got really close (about 4 feet away from us on shore) we saw that it was actually a fish! Amazing! I have never seen anything even approaching that size, let alone in three feet of water! It swam over to us to check us out, and then slowly swam away, obviously not as impressed by us as we were of him! Later, we heard from some locals that he has been living in the area for up to 50 yars and is known locally as "Marve". I am shocked but happy that he has not landed on someone's "barbie" (as the locals would say) yet!

After that encounter, we all went snorkelling and between us saw 4 black tip reef sharks, but they looked small compared to good old Marve!!!

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