How good is that!!!!!!
We spent some lovely time at the magnificent beaches along the Ningaloo Marine Park within Cape Range National Park. The beautiful blue water never fails to fascinate. But don’t be fooled by the crystal blue water as it is freezing cold!
Unfortunately at this time of the year, the wind blows pretty strong along the West coast and can spoil once experience a bit. Though the sun is strong, the wind is cold and it’s not possible to stay outside after sunset.
In Coral Bay a branch broke of the tree above and landed on our roof rack right on top of my bike. The constant blowing sound in your ears can actually make you a bit mad! Now, that we got rid of the flies and were even hoping for some cooling down…
Equipped with a wetsuit we snorkeled at the amazingly accessible Ningaloo reef (the outer reef lying only 100m offshore from some parts of the beach). There was wonderful marine life to enjoy, fish swarms and the most colorful and beautiful designed fishes. Sometimes a sea turtle head popped up between stacks of amazing formations of mostly hard corals.
It is a beautiful sight to see an ancient creature, like sea turtle ‘flying’ through the water.
Right now it’s nesting time, the time for the females to come to the beach and start laying their eggs at night time. Even so we found their tracks going up into the sand dunes, we never managed to see one at night time; waiting crouched into the sand hoping to be witnesses of that special moment. Apparently another beach further north was a sight of hundreds of turtles coming ashore…damn it!
By crossing ‘Yardie Creek’ at low tide we continued on to Coral Bay via a sandy track further along the coast, where we had all the romantic beaches to ourselves!(Well, almost) We met a group of guys that spend some time fishing for seriously big fish. And guess what - they gave us a beautiful sautéed Red Emperor fish for dinner. Just like that….that’s Australian!
Not much later they needed our help to get pulled out and start up the car, so that we ended up with two bottles of good wine in addition to our fish dinner…It came in quiet handy as we were slowly running out of food having spent quiet some time away from any supermarket.
To our great disappointment, people still don’t treat those pristine places accordingly and burry their rubbish in plastic bags just the sand…very sad! Sea turtles feed on Jelly fishes, and a floating plastic bag looks astonishing familiar to a jelly fish, you can imagine the outcome.
Coral BayWho would have known that we would spend ‘Melbourne Cup’ in a pub in the resort town Coral Bay.
To our surprise the pub was packed with dressed up people, horse racing bets were taken and even a crap race took place, a bit controversial because at least one crap lost a few legs unfortunately.
About to go for the next dive
We came here to dive and hopefully see the Manta Ray, which lives in this area all year around.
It has been three years since our last scuba dive and we were a bit rusty with all the equipment but it went very well! Diving between stacks and stacks of hard corals makes you realize how fragile and delicate a reef actually is. You should hurry up to experience it while it is still alive; it probably will be dead in two centuries…And yes, we met the Manta Ray! We snorkeled above and behind it when it, while it did its feeding roll – with its mouth wide open it graciously rolled over and over again like in a constant summersault to catch the most krill to feeds on. AMAZING!!!
Happy faces after seeing the Manta Ray
Please have a look at our newly uploaded photos on flickr(click on link top right hand corner)
Cheers, Alex and Andy
