Day 55, 25 August 2009, Exmouth

We had scheduled a snorkelling trip for today, out on the Ningaloo reef but that got cancelled as the wind has come up. We've re-scheduled for a whale watching trip later in the day.

Had a short jaunt to Town Beach which is a couple of sand dunes from the caravan park. Pam commented that she was going to eat her SANDwich on the beach. You start to get the idea of what 8 weeks in a car and caravan with me can do to any otherwise quite normal person.

While picking up the bread and milk in town I ran into Wendy and Col, our caravan park neighbours from Fitzroy Crossing. They're heading back up over the top, hoping to arrive in Cairns prior to the wet. Always nice to catch up with new old friends.

A real high point of our stay in Exmouth was the afternoon's trip in a glassbottom boat. We started with a good look over the Ningaloo Reef, seeing both intact reef and parts closer to shore that had been damaged in the 1999 cyclone. The boat driver linked damage to coral reefs world-wide to global warming, but I managed to keep my mouth shut.

The boat was about ten meters long and had room for maybe 20 passengers. There were only about ten on our's; a Belgian family, a German couple, us and another couple from Geraldton.

After our look over the reef, we went out past the north end of the North West Cape. I admit I had a degree of scepticism, expecting our chances of seeing whales to be of the same order as hearing Willy Nelson's 'The Red-Headed Stranger' being sung by Dinky, The Singing Dingo. (See Day 13).

I was wrong. We saw enough whales to keep our Japanese neighbours in 'Scientific Sushi' for a generation. One pair in particular appeared to swim around our boat for over an hour, surfacing from time to time, sometimes only 20 meters or so from us. They were so close, when they diappeared under the waves, everyone looked through the glass bottom, expecting to see a big eye looking back. (That didn't happen, unfortunately.)

Our boat driver kept us out well past the appointed (and paid for) time; I think he enjoyed the trip as much as we did.