Monkey Mia magic!

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Day 53 – Tuesday 21^st August – Monkey Mia/ Cape Peron

This morning the unthinkable happened – when we woke up there were proper dark grey clouds in the sky it really looked like it would rain. How could this happen? Clouds and rain for our morning at Monkey Mia! We decided that we would drive the 40 minutes to Monkey Mia resort and hope that the wet weather would have blown away by the time it got to the first dolphin interaction scheduled for 7.45am.

The clouds persisted but the rain stayed away – hooray! At Monkey Mia resort we paid our $16 entrance fee and happily found that it was happy hour at the coffee shop. Rangers keep the crowds off the beach before the dolphin interaction is supposed to start. Over the years the Rangers have learnt from mistakes made in the past with the Monkey Mia dolphin feeding programme and now only five female dolphins - Nikki, Puck, Piccolo, Shock and Surprise- are allowed to be fed a certain amount of fish a day. Nikki, Puck and Piccolo turn up daily for their interaction with the funny humans on the beach and their reward of some fish but Shock and Surprise are less regular, hence their names – the Rangers get a shock and a surprise when they show up! The five feeding dolphins often bring along their offspring and mates to the beach but only those five particular dolphins are fed by the tourists.

Before the dolphins are fed the tourists are asked to line up knee deep in the water along the beach and the Ranger explains about dolphins in general and the dolphins in Shark Bay. It is a very informative 20 minute chat. Once the 20 minutes are up (this is timed accurately by the staff), we were asked to step out of the water and back onto the sand as the signal to the dolphins that their fish reward would be arriving shortly. And sure enough, 5 volunteers came marching down the beach with a bucket each. Each person stood in the water next to their dolphin that was to be fed. Then came the exciting part – individuals were picked out from the crowd on the beach to come into the water and feed one fish to a dolphin. We were shocked and surprised (to coin a phrase) when Luke was selected as the very first person. He was told he could bring his sister so Anna and Luke went into the water with Puck and fed her a fish. Very special! The other children in the audience we called into the water too to feed the dolphins. Once the fish were all gone the dolphins quickly knew that the “show” was over and swam away from the beach.

Between 8am and midday the dolphins can be fed up to three times from the beach. The first “interaction time” is always at 8am but there are no set times for the other two sessions. It just depends on when the dolphins come into the shallow beach for a “chat” and some fish. The other two interactions this morning happened not too long after the first, so we ended up watching three interactions and the kids managed to feed Puck twice as the audience was quite small today (compared with 250 people turning up last Saturday to watch!). Oh, and guess who came onto the beach for the second interaction? Only the ‘Bloody Oath I am’ family! I had a feeling we’d see them again at Monkey Mia.

We’d had an unforgettable morning but as it still wasn’t proper beach weather being windy and cloudy (pesky clouds – who ordered them?) we decided to pop into Denham for a quick look at this little town. It is small and picturesque with a couple of caravan parks etc but we were glad we had chosen to camp in the National Park, away from all caravans and grey nomads. As it is the middle of the school term there are very few kids around travelling, just the lucky blighters who are on long trips with their families!

After lunch we decided to drive up to the most northerly point of the peninsula and National Park – Cape Peron. That meant heading back towards the campsite on the sandy road and driving north for another 40 kms. The wind had finally blown away the clouds and it had turned into a gorgeous afternoon as we walked along the red sandy cliff tops at Cape Peron towards Skipjack Point. The views and colours were sensational and this became my favourite non-gorge walk of the trip so far. From our viewpoint we could see a pod of dolphins playing and hunting for fish along the beach below, so we decided to go down onto the beach to watch them. It was like this morning’s interaction all over again, getting a close up view of these beautiful creatures. If we’d had our swimming stuff with us we would have gone in for a swim with them to see if they would have hung around with us. But we didn’t so we had to stay on the beach and watch them. We climbed back up the steep dunes to regain the walking track to Skipjack Point. From the lookouts there we saw several dugongs right below us! Shark Bay is home to a population of around 14,000 dugongs, which is 10% of the global population, because of the huge area of sea meadows it houses. We also saw turtles but couldn’t spot any manta rays or eagle rays.

We got back to our campsite just before sunset and cooked up a meal of chicken in a tomato sauce with red pepper, onion, garlic and corn served with rice. The grown-ups won at cards before the kids went to bed!

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