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Published: August 7th 2007
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Australasia » Australia » Western Australia » Coral Bay By elluco
May 21st 2007
7.30. It feels like ground hog day! I'm late, everyone in the group knows my name as I walk in as they've been frantically calling the hostel (which is incidentally 50m away) and asking every punter who walks into the shop 'are you luke'. Nice entrance.
This is my first and only crack at this. Hope the Gods are with me. Had a few last night with a Finnish couple. Cant remember most of it, but do remember them stating that the Finnish national dish looks like shit and actually tastes like it also. They also said dont bother going to the country as its shit also! Well there u have it. Chaque Cherac was right!
So first thing to do when I get on the boat is have a kip. The trip is about 2 hrs to the outer reef. From there they have a spotter plan in the sky, running predetermined lines looking for the sharks. Its a cloudy day, so visibility is crap. The waiting game begins. It can take all day to find one of these suckers!
After awaking
from my slumber, its a matter of chatting until we get the green light! The
Fish n thang
crew do their best to alay our bordom and fears of not seeing one.
Time for lunch, after noodles and pasta n sauce for a few days, I take it as a personal challenge to eat as many of the cold meats and salads as possible! Nice! May have problems floating!
The afternoon drags on with no notion of a sighting. The troops are getting a little unsettled and talk of doing the trip again start emerging. Then the engines on the boat fire up, the crew come alive and its action stations. Even this is quite a buzz after, sitting around chatting crap and wondering did I do all those Kms, smells and hours of desert on the bus for bugger all! Hope I get my monies worth!
We make it to the site and there's another boat also. Protocol has it that only 10 people can be in the water at anytime, and that 1 boat must be in the zone while the other must remain 200m away. Theres a few other eco-type rules. Which is all
well and good, but as soon as these suckers get into indonesian waters the indos are firing all
Action stations b4 the drop
sorts of pointy crap at them, as they're worth $50000 USD a pop! Hooray for world conservation in its limited form!
Anyway, we line up, just before we jump in the water, i pull the air hose off my mask, by the time i get it sorted and get in the water, the shark had dived and the only thing I get to see is the ass of some 'whale 'of an american on the trip. $350 to see a fat arse underwater! Meanwhile everyone else is ranting and raving, as they all were dropped more or less on top of the sucker (against protocol). Not happy! It was apparently 7m.
Luckily it resurfaces and me and fatty, get to be the first in the water. My survival, competitive and selfish natures kicks in. If fatty as much as gets in my way, she'll get a fin in the face! As it happens theres no need to resort to underwater martial arts. We get dropped in front of the fish and out of the depths
this monster is heading straight for me. It looks as if it is swimming in slow motion, with the huge tail fin, gracefully
Shoal
moving from side to side. Then comes the realisation thats its, huge tail, is also displacing huge amounts of water and this thing is coming at me a lot faster than i can swim away from it. Christ, its mouth is 1.5m wide! I nearly crap myself trying to move to the side and out of the path of its mouth. What a sight as it glides, seeminly slowly past, its tail moving 2-3 m in both directions. If you got hit by it, it would break a lot of rips and and then some! I suddenly feel very small and vunderable! It eventually out runs us! Pricey but still worth the money!
The shark dives!
We get a call from our pilot that he has spotted another and its a biggy! As if 7m isnt! The engines start and we're off, everyone is a lot more settled now as you kind of know what happens from here on in. Little did we know the display and interaction that was to follow.
We
do the first drop, with the usual underwater and elbow fight with the other swimmers. I'm a black belt!
I spend time swimming
Group Photo
above him, we've been told its a he, and its pretty easy to see why and he's a big boy. Oh yea and he 14m as well, the biggest of the season so far. Our group get out, group b gets in and then we repeat it.
We do one more drop. Now whale sharks are funny old creatures and they (eco people) dont really know a lot about them, as there's little funding and theres been little interest in studying them. They're not really sure, where exactly they breed and the ritual has never been witnessed. Again unlike Whales, they can stay below for months at a time and at great depths, so tagging them with sattelite tracking devices is unreliable. A few beacon signals have ended up in Asian Fish markets though! But what is generally known is they're not that intertesed in humans, and get pretty spooked by 10 slashing fins, and boats engine in their general facinity. The normal response is to dive, or turn their back, which is
a quite hard and arch away from the swimmers.
In our case, this dude decided, for whatever reason, that our boat was quite attractive and
Pre Action stations
he being a full blooded male, to put it bluntly; try and hump it. This of course is open to conjecture, but what we witnessed was initially the shark in a vertical position, and then it rolling over and over, with wedding tackle out, and then circling under the boat. Who knows why, but according to the crew it was the first time they have ever seen such behaviour. Maybe it was my aftershave and stunnig goog looks or because he was so big, the biggest of the season, that he wasnt as scared of the swimmers and just considered us just annoying non fishy smelling fish! Either way it was an awsome experience. At one point he followed 3 of us along the side of the boat and poked his head out of the water. The only way to avoid sticking my fin and I suppose my leg in his mouth was to pull myself out of the water by holding onto the hand rail! Jesus christ, what a buzz
!
You can imagine the pandamoniun, in and out of the water while all this was happening, the fish finally lost interest in the boat, no home run
Whale Shark Tail shot
for him !!!! While swimming away another boat dropped in after watching the scene unfold from probably 15 mins!
After that we headed back to shore, 2 hours of whale shark stories!
Well, thats it, great experience and probably beats the Thailand Temple tiger , although those dudes did have the capacity to eat me! If you are in the area, in season I'd well advise it.
Thats it, i'm outta coral bay the next day, gonna spend the day getting flights to Perth and then a red eye outta Perth back to Sydney, have a beer or 2 then onto New Zealand for mountains, cliffs, cold and sheep.
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