Christmas at Monky Mia

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Christmas itself was spent at Monkey Mia where despite its name, there are no monkeys to be found. Having arrived Christmas eve we were able to celebrate an early start to Christmas day. This consisted of standing knee deep at 07:30 in the cool and very blue waters of the bay. It turns out that after decades of effort some of the local dolphins have managed to train the human species to stand in a line at the waters edge and feed them fish. In all, 9 dolphins, adult and young, turned up to see how our classes were getting on and a few lucky people got to show off their new found skills by handing fish to the dolphins. Impressive stuff. We followed this up with a traditional Christmas swim in the bay, both for the pleasure of it and because in this sheltered relatively windless location the true nature of the sun was revealed in all its flesh scorching ferocity.

We successfully masked our Anglo Saxon origins by forsaking the traditional Christmas roast for spam rolls, and then blew the subterfuge by staying out under the mid day sun. As we did not end up barking like mad dogs, though it was a close run thing, I think that the more sun wise revellers sat in the shade were forced to conclude that we were indeed English.

For the afternoon we resorted once again to the cool waters of the bay. As we drifted lazily in the shallows some people seemed to take exception at our splashing and started calling out rather urgently. We could not make out the words at first and tried to ignore them, for my part thinking that they were calling out to some friends further down the beach. Now you’d think that there would be some sort of internationally recognised hand signal for “Get out of the water there is a shark nearby” but there is not, so these kind people, bless them, persisted with their shouting until we finally got the gist of the message and rather abruptly ceased to both drift and be lazy about it. Instead we headed for shore with all the disguised urgency of people who think they might be the butt of a joke shark warning but, what the hell, we were just about to get out anyway. Languid arm strokes disguising legs thrashing like their continued attachment to the rest of the body depended on it.

A group of Australian tourists who entered the water 50 metres up the beach only added to our feeling that someone was playing a joke on us, and for about 10 minutes we watched them closely to see if any of their party was suddenly dragged out to sea. It didn’t really occur to us to pass on the warning. Having studied them intently and not finding any signs of fear, panic, or sudden amputations amongst them I decided to go back in, but C delayed the moment by declaring a cigarette. We had only just lit up when the group of Australians made an impressively quick dash for the shore, and for the next 5 minutes we all watched together as an ominously dark shape cruised up and down the shore just out from where we were all swimming. The less dramatic finale to this tale is that the ‘predator’ actually turned out to be a less than predatory manta ray, but hey, it’s not called Shark Bay for nothing and what to you might seem like cowardice to us was simply the right mix of discretion and valour.

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Photos

Christmas 2005
Christmas morning visitors