Shark Bay to Coral Bay

It's a long way into Shark Bay from the main highway that threads north to Port Headland and beyond but it is well worth the effort. A couple of travellers tips though, make sure you stop off for supplies at larger places before you stop in Denham or Monkey Mia, and if you are thinking of camping in Denham bring a drill in order to get the tent pegs in the ground. I recall looking at three tomatoes for sale for $4 at the local store in Denham with the same stunned disbelief that I had looking at bent peg that I had been bashing into the ground an hour before. The next day I was stunned again when we saw emus in the sea at Monkey Mia. One could say it was a stunning experience all round. Callam covered off very well the experience that we had on the Shotover catamaran in the previous blog but I will add a photo of the crazy emus.

And I suppose now thinking about it after seeing kangaroos on the beach in Cape Le Grand it does seem to make sense to have these two beach loving animals as part of our national emblem.

We were lucky enough to arrive at Monkey Mia for the third feeding of the dolphins and as luck would have it Marley was lucky enough to be chosen to feed one of the dolphins.

I stuck the Go Pro in the water....and as luck would have it a mother and calf swam past. But because video is a pain to upload here are some photos of those cheeky creatures.

And I better not forget these two sea dogs we saw out and about.

Overall Monkey Mia and Shark Bay were well worth the visit. We were fortunate enough not to compete with crowds of people and we saw a lot of sea life.

Coral Bay was  our next destination. We stopped off in Carnarvon for supplies, it looks nothing like Carnarvon in Wales BTW. This place had bent gum and palm trees that seemed to have been bent by the strong winds the place tends to experience. They grow a lot of tiny bananas up here which are quite delicious, they even have a little big banana on the road out of town which commemorates "The home of the lunch box banana." I was too stuuned/lazy to take a shot of it so you will have our word for it.

Coral bay is approached through some very arid country dotted with termite mounds and red earth. It is surprising then to get out to get out of the car and get hit by the humidity. It we were primarily in Coral Bay for snorkelling, fishing and swimming with whale sharks, sunburn was just an added bonus. The good thing about Coral Bay is that you can walk into the water and in a few metres you are swimming amongst some beautifully colourful fish and coral. Finn was very excited by all this and found a confidence that was to encourage him a few days later when he went out snorkelling in the open sea on Ningaloo reef proper where to his delight he saw some even bigger coral formations coral and two Loggerhead turtles, his squeals of delight were hilarious.

Marley and Captain Macca

The boys with brother Jim

Unfortunately Finn was just a little too small to dive with the whale sharks but he did manage to see one from the surface. The rest of us managed to get into the water up to five times each to see two whale sharks up close and although they were reasonably "small" at 6 -7 meters thy did appear to be very large and majestic.  

A view of our boat out on Ningaloo reef

The whole experience was made possible by Captain Macca and Callam and Finn's new brother, Jim.

Another great experience we had was out on the boat Seaforce reeling in all sorts of snapper , cod and the occassional Red Emporer. Cal and I did pretty well catching the biggest two fish of the day , a Gold Banded Snapper and a Red Emporer. For those that are interested we used two hook baited with sardines and squid on a hand line dropped to 100-110meters. Cal did the long haul up with a couple of fish including a 2kg Honeycomb Cod, it was the best fish he had ever eaten. We had so much fish we had to give some away.

Our two big ones which other people also had their photos taken with them! Fibbers.

Our box of fish.

Well we are in the Pilbarra now and will update soon on our Karinjini Dales gorge experience and our trip down the Rio Tinto mine. Cheers for now.