Featured Image: Jazz II

We’ve been on another boat for a day!  It was a perfect warm clear day with light swell, hardly a breeze and hypnotic turquoise blue seas. Jayne did surprising well, her sea legs did wander off at one stage but they came back again by about midday. The boat we were on was the 53′ “Jazz II”. Run by the Exmouth Dive Centre, it’s licensed to take 23 but as luck would have it there were only 7 guests on our trip and 5 crew.

I left the camera at home today as we knew there would be a photographer on board and the trip included a bunch of photos and a video (still to come later). Plus, you see an awful lot more when you’re not fiddling with camera bits. And we did just that.

It was a truly “Epic” day out as our very enthusiastic and capable photographer, Katia, constantly described the day’s activities. Check out her FacePlant Page, KISSthedolphin).  Our trip was the first calm and clear day they’d had for a while so the whole crew were very upbeat. All the photos on this post were taken on the day by Katia. Epic!

Have you ever looked down the throat of an 9m long whale shark (or about 29.5 feet in the old measure or as long as our caravan!) ? It looks bit like this.

They are identified by their spots and tracked in a worldwide database. We’ve just found out this one is called Roald Dahl – BFG (Big Friendly Giant – 9m long)
They have really, really, really, big mouths! It’s hard to get an idea of the size of these gentle giants from just a photo. It’s amazing to be right there next to them as they cruise along. You can see a diver towards the tail of this one below.

Here’s Jayne and I smiling for the camera at a safe distance… Not that they bite as they feed on plankton including copepods, krill and fish eggs. But I’m pretty sure they’d win a head-butt or tail flick competition.

Swim with Whale Shark – Tick this one off the bucket list.

There was a lot of other life to swim with and around on the reef as well.

Lots of dolphins. 2 flavours, bottlenose dolphins and Australian humpback dolphins.

Between dives with whale sharks we came a cross a school of Mahi Mahi (dolphinfish). So the boat stopped and about 5 of us just jumped in for a look.

While we were in the water we also saw a seahorse just hanging on a weed out in the middle of nowhere.

A sea snake shedding it’s skin

And a 2m Dusky Whaler shark. A proper looking shark… I had just dived down to about 15′ to see a school of fish when I noticed the dusky whaler shark coming up from the deep, just cruising. I surfaced near our photographer Katia and tapped her on the shoulder. This made her jump as I’d surprised her a bit while she was taking photos. I just said “shark” and pointed at the dusky. That’s all I needed to say, she just took off down toward the shark to take a video. The rest of the snorkelers also heard me say “shark” and as you’d expect, no, they didn’t high tail it back to the boat, they all swam over to see the shark.  It’s hard to be afraid of a big thing with teeth when there are so many other crazy people in the water who you know you can swim faster than.

Yes it is a proper looking shark with teeth but it is also such a beautiful looking creature to see up close just cruising about. It then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

Every where you looked there seemed to be another whale breaching. Mostly humpbacks but we did get to see a couple of rarer minke whales between dives.

Inside the reef we saw some huge rays. This one one was about 7 feet across. It was the small one.

Making our way back in behind the reef we saw many turtles and at one point had a dolphin escort as it rode the bow wave on the boat.

There’s no doubt about the diversity and quantity of life in the Ningaloo Reef area. It’s an absolute marine paradise. Far better than anything we have seen on any of the East coast of Australia.

Crazy Crew!

What a day!

05 Aug This entry was published on 05/08/2016 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.