Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Special Place - Special Times

Special Place – Special Times
Once again we were out and about in June, Whale shark sightings around Coral Bay had started to drop off but they were replaced with Humpback Whales.

We headed out for 5 days with our guests Dennis & Fran and another first for Shore Thing as Fran celebrated her Birthday on Board, 21 again wasn’t it Fran ?!

Although the weather gods kept us on our toes, we still managed to tick all the boxes and create a few more to try and better in the future.

Manta Rays, Dugongs, Turtles and whales were all sighted on regular occurrence and were duly logged in the Shore Thing mega fauna sightings log.

This time we ran into a new friend, a Bottlenose Dolphin that was
cruising around the North Reef and Stanley Pool area all on his lonesome and decided to come and ride the bow wave of Shore Thing, not once but 2 days in a row, and on the second day he (or she) earned his nickname, Leapin Leroy, as Lannie captured this photo of him jumping clear out of the water. He did this about 5 times and had everyone on board cheering.

Needless to say there was some pretty epic snorkelling missions, with Dennis & Fran just as keen as the crew to get into the water and see what they could find.

One of the highlights would have to have been the sail back north towards Coral Bay. Having checked out a nice surf break and watch some talented surfers at play we went outside the reef under full sail to try our hand at catching the evening meal.





It must be said that it is pretty hard to get Dennis to share his excitement as on a couple of occasions he sighted a whale breaching, but failed to voice the obligatory scream of “BREACH!” to let everyone else know what was going on. Thankfully though after losing one good sized fish that he got right into the back of Shore Thing, on the second hook up, after a few minutes he filled us in on what was going on and John and Dennis managed to land a good sized Spanish Mackeral! Dennis had even brought his own Wasabi so there was no surprise what he had on his mind!

And so it was, another 5 days out exploring the Ningaloo Reef and still new things were found and no doubt there’ll be more soon.