Tuesday 8th June - Monkey Mia

We’ve had a fairly packed day, mostly involving dolphins.

You can understand why they have to control the interaction with the dolphins at the morning feeding as there was a large crowd gathered before 7.30am, but you’d be hard pushed to see wild dolphins at such close quarters elsewhere.

We were told to walk slowly down to the water, stand knee deep and let the dolphins come to us.  Hands were to be kept out of the water as the dolphins have taken a nip in the past.  It was amazing to see these animals so close, with 14 swimming about near the jetty.  The dolphins were all female and several had babies, but only five are fed (with less than 10% of their daily fish requirement so they do not become dependent on the handouts).  As soon as feeding was over they were off without a backward glance.

We’d yet to try out our new flippers and snorkels, so we donned swimming gear and went out into the bay for a trial run before we reach Ningaloo Reef near Exmouth.  The water felt a bit parky, but the snorkelling gear seemed to be fine although more practice with the flippers is required.  We had hoped that some dolphins may come over to see us but we had no such luck, although they were still out there as we could see them in the distance once we got out of the water.  Hopefully we’ll get to swim with dolphins another time.

We’d booked a cruise around the bay on a racing catamaran in the afternoon, with the promise of dugongs, turtles, sea snakes and more dolphins.

We’d been warned that it would be unusual to see a dugong this time of year as they travel further north as the weather gets colder and they unfortunately didn’t show up, but the dolphins came out to play and numerous turtles scattered as we passed over the world’s largest seagrass meadow.

Even without the dugongs, spending the afternoon on the water was great and we think that sailing lessons should be added onto our “To Do” list.

A “free” sundowner cruise was offered as an incentive to book the cruise, so we had 30 minutes to grab a bottle of wine and some nibbles before setting out to watch the sun set over the bay.

What a lovely end to a great day.