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Published: October 17th 2010
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I’m standing next to Paula and 8 others on the back board of a boat in the open sea. To the left is the Indian Ocean - nothing until you get to Madagascar. To the right I can just see the waves breaking over the Ningaloo Reef about a mile away, then after that the coast of Western Australia.
We’re rolling and pitching with the waves, with a cold wind blasting the into us. I’m wearing two wetsuits and a snorkel and still shivering.
The skipper is shouting down directions to our guide, and pointing out across the water. We are about to swim with a whaleshark - the largest of the sharks and in fact the largest fish on the planet.
The guide shouts go, and one by one we take a large stride and plop in. The water is cold but clear, a dark milky blue colour and quite choppy, the wind whipping up the tips of the waves.
We split into two groups in the water and swim away from the boat with the guide. A few minutes later, she shouts ‘contact’, raises one fist in the air and points with the other arm
under water for the direction that the shark is coming from.
I’m hovering with my head in the water - looking where the guide is pointing, but can’t see anything except blue. Not even the bottom. All I can hear is the faint whistle, click and whoop of humpback whales calling to each other. Then out of the gloom about 30 metres away and only a couple of metres down comes a great blue-grey head.
The first thing you see is a huge mouth gaping open to scoop in plankton, then the stripes running along his massive body as he gets closer and closer. He’s graceful and slow-looking, but we realise he’s actually powering along quite fast and he’s now alongside and his big long tail is closing fast, so we turn and swim alongside, at just over an arm‘s length away.
It‘s hard to tell how big he is at this point, but his mouth could easily swallow a car. He’s shaped like a shark, and is moving his head side-to-side ever so slightly as he wafts himself along. He’s flanked by a few smaller fish swimming alongside.
At this point I am swearing up
my snorkel in amazement - amazed that something that big exists. He’s about 7-8 metres long. Not at all scary - he clearly has no interest in us at all.
It’s not too difficult to keep up and we get about 5 minutes to swim and watch and swear some more, then the guide calls us off and gives the other group from our boat a chance. We take it in turns until either the shark dives or another boat comes along.
This continues for the rest of the day - climbing out of the boat, shivering, then jumping back in and swimming with more. In all we see about 5 different whalesharks about 8-9 different times. The biggest is about 9 metres long.
Throughout the day we pass pods of humpbacks making their way south to the Antarctic, mums and calves, some within 20-30 metres of the boat.
Fantastic and exhausting. We’re asleep by 8pm that night.
Next day we’re back out on another boat, this time to do some proper diving. We get two dives. On the way down to about 25 metres we see 3 manta rays glide past (parents and baby), which look like they’re flying. We also see a couple of black-tip reef sharks, and a grey reef shark (couple of metres long) that follows us around for a few minutes. We also see a Wobegong shark sitting under a rock.
On the way back up to the boat we do our safety stop (hang in the water for 3 minutes at 5 metres depth). Just as we’re about to head to the surface, Paula and I glimpse a big shark in the distance, just level with us. It’s clearly just had a good look at us and decided we’re not food, and all we see is its head turn away, and a big swish of the tail as it disappears.
Our guide didn’t see it, but there had been reports of a tiger shark spotted earlier that day, so it could have been him. Not sure exactly how big he was, but he was no tiddler. So as I was hanging in the water, thinking about the cake I was going to eat when I got out, a huge predator was behind me, sizing me up and thinking whether or not I was worth eating. Brilliant.
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Joe
non-member comment
You could have fired a Ginger Torpedo at him if he came too close.