Swimming with Whale Sharks and Mantas in Exmouth and Coral Bay
This post is part of our Western Australia road trip. In case you don’t want to read this sequentially, or you are looking for another part of the trip, here are some shortcuts:
- Lake Ballard
- Exmouth and Coral Bay <– You are here
- Shark Bay and Monkey Mia
- Kalbarri
- Jurien Bay
Exmouth
Exmouth is on the tip of the North West Cape in Western Australia. It was used as a military base in World War II and is still used as a naval communication station.
The station provides very low frequency (VLF) radio transmission to United States Navy and Royal Australian Navy ships and submarines in the western Pacific Ocean and eastern Indian Ocean. The frequency is 19.8 kHz. With a transmission power of 1 megawatt, it is the most powerful transmission station in the Southern Hemisphere. (Wikipedia)
It was cloudy but we still caught a few glimpses of the interesting terrain below.
While Andy waited for our bags, I completed the hire car paperwork. It took a while to find the car because it was parked in the Hertz section and we’d rented with Avis. We also had to promise not to drive outside of town after dark.
As I mentioned at the beginning, we really struggled to find accommodation on this trip. We booked three months out and the only accommodation that I could find for three nights was the Osprey Holiday Village, which only had poor reviews on Trip Advisor but ok reviews on AirBNB. I’m still a little triggered by cleanliness after the Baird Bay incident and we certainly didn’t need a three bedroom house, but it was the only option so we went with it. Osprey Village is a cluster of about 20 homes and is walking distance to the town centre. Our unit was clean and the service from Exmouth Holidays was superb. The BBQ, which was spotless, ran out of gas on our last day and they replaced the bottle within minutes of my call. For full disclosure, there were no ospreys. That’s a joke and a reference to someone we heard complaining in Fiji about the lack of a proper swimming lagoon at the Beqa Lagoon Resort.
We had a free day built in to our itinerary because we originally would have travelled from Sydney to Perth to Exmouth the day before and wanted to be well rested for our whale shark swims. We slept in, did laundry, and then headed over to Cape Range National Park in the afternoon. It was really windy and rain was on the way, but the views were still spectacular. We’d love to come back to camp here, once we learn how to, um, camp.
Once back at the Osprey, we walked over to the town centre to check on our whale shark tour given the deteriorating weather. We were disappointed to find out our tour was cancelled for the following day, but thankful that the tour operator wasn’t going out in the wind and high seas. This also gives us an excuse to come back to Exmouth 🙂
It absolutely bucketed on Wednesday. We drove around town and saw lots of new development since we visited in 2015. The town centre is the same, with some tour operators, a camping/fishing store, a Cellarbrations, two IGAs, a few cafes, and a bakery. As an American-Australian, bakeries are often a disappointment because they usually stock mostly bread, meat pies, lamingtons, and slices. There are rarely muffins or other sweet pastries, and if there is something that looks vaguely like a cinnamon roll it usually turns out to be a vegemite scroll. The Ningaloo Bakehouse had it all though, including a super cute shopping bag.
When I mentioned the deteriorating weather, I wasn’t whinging about clouds and a bit of rain. Exmouth got a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours. We walked over to the bakery for coffee and the town centre was packed with wet and soggy campers. We got a text from the Osprey to check if we were ok and advise us of some road closures. They also called later in the day to make sure we were ok. Had it not been so windy I would have put the drone up, but check out the aerial photographs in this article from PerthNow.
Coral Bay
With the skies clearing and the storm behind us, we headed south to Coral Bay. There was a lot of flooding and detours at the start, but the roads got better the further we travelled south.
The drive took us about two hours and we arrived around noon. Checkin time wasn’t until 2pm, so we walked around and had lunch at Fins Cafe.
We stayed in hilltop villa #15 at People’s Park. The villas are located on a hill above the caravan park, with great sunset views and an elevated boardwalk shortcut to get to the main street. The villa layout was a little weird, with a bed in the main room and then a bedroom with bunks, but I guess there’s more of a market for accommodation with more beds. Kangaroos visited in the mornings, and a kestrel ate lizards on the neighbour’s fence in the evenings.
Coral Bay has more of a family / grey nomad vibe and seemed less Bohemian than Exmouth. It’s also a lot smaller, with a Foodworks, bottle shop, and bakery in the shopping area. The bakery is cash only and was equally good to the one in Exmouth.
Main Street (Robinson Street), Coral Bay
While in Coral Bay, we did a whale shark safari with Coral Bay Eco Tours. We met at their office at 7:30, and then boarded a bus for a short drive to the jetty. After a check-out snorkel with turtles inside the reef, we ventured out into open water in search of the giant spotty fish. There was a bit of a swell and my half Kwells was not doing its job. As soon as we saw some humpbacks breaching and got word that the spotter plane had found a whale shark I got distracted and forgot about possibly needing to vomit over the side of the boat.
Still inside the reef so not much swell
Once we found the whale shark, we were divided into two groups of ten. When it is your group’s turn, you don your gear and sit on the duckboard waiting for the signal. When the captain shouts “go, go go” you drop into the water and get into position to watch the 6-10 meter (20-30 foot) whale shark swim by. On approach they look deceptively slow, but when their pectoral fins pass and you start to swim to keep up with them you realise how fast they are travelling. Eventually your group is instructed to stop, the other group enters the water, you return to the boat, and the boat drives into position for another drop. It is very controlled, unlike our experience in Mexico. After four cycles we were spent and grinning ear to ear.
Snorkelers for scale – like swimming next to a bus
Spotted a few red jellies while waiting to be picked up
We also spent a day with Ningaloo Marine Interactions on their “best of Ningaloo Mantas and More” tour.
This full day trip stayed inside the reef so it was much calmer. We saw turtles, dugongs, bottle nose dolphins, and swam with turtles, mantas, and even a tiger shark (a little one though, not like the ones in the Bahamas). You can’t tell how large the mantas are from the photos, but they can have up to a 25 foot wingspan. Most mantas have a white belly, but one of the ones we swam with had a dark belly and we learned that those are called melanistic mantas. You can also see the rermoras, who have a symbiotic relationship with the mantas: The remora clean the manta ray and get food scraps and transport in return.
We did have a slight mishap… Andy was sitting on the duckboard after swimming with the tiger shark and the boat hit a swell and his camera went tumbling into the ocean. I watched the whole thing unfold from a few feet back, but it was in slow motion for me and all I could do was yell “camera” like Marlon Brando yelling “Stella” in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. He went in straight after it, and luckily we were in shallow water so he was able to free dive and retrieve it while the boat circled back to get him. My mind was racing with thoughts of how to explain this to the insurance company and him not having a camera (or housing) for the rest of our two-week trip. His thoughts were more centred on the tiger shark. He is the absolute luckiest person I know. If it was me, I would have gone in after it, been unable to find it, and then been attacked by the tiger shark.
After three nights in Coral Bay, we headed to Shark Bay and Monkey Mia. Continue reading…
