Snorkelling Ningaloo

Today was long-awaited on this journey. It was the day we got to go snorkelling on the Ningaloo Reef off Cape Range national park south of North West Cape. Unfortunately for you, we got to enjoy it but you won’t because no kind-hearted benefactor sponsored us an underwater camera. Perhaps tomorrow our glass-bottomed boat may be a more shareable experience.

Conditions were just about perfect. The day dawned bright and clear and after a fortifying breakfast it was down to the visitor centre for some last-minute tips. While there, we discovered that we could supplement our well-travelled but insufficient snorkelling kit for $5 a day each. A real bargain I thought, so we took it up so we didn’t have to share as much.

Now we are Queenslanders so our requirements are pretty high to be impressed. Our first issue was the water temperature. Now it is the middle of winter, so any complaints could be considered a little churlish, but decked out in our stinger suits and other gear, you could only stay in for a half hour or so, before hypothermia took hold.  Our string-bean boys lasted even less. The next problem was that with the air temperature only about 25, a breeze blowing, and a sun you can see but not really feel, it took a long time to warm up again for another go. Elliot passed the time on the beach between dips.

Now compensating for that problem was the fact that with the tide being low in the middle of the day, you could literally step off the beach and while you put your fins on you can watch the fish swimming around, and within 10m be over the coral. Very convenient! No need to waste any time cooling down swimming in or out.

So was it impressive? In a word yes. Quite different from East Coast reefs. The reef around here is, globally speaking, quite unusual. It is not common for a reef to grow on the western side of a continent apparently, so the difference is not surprising. Now I suspect the best reef is about 400m offshore where the waves were breaking, making conditions in at the beach calm and flat generally, with only a little swell, and a slight drift along the beach, so the coral is patchy, not as dense, and not as richly varied as we have seen. Making up for that was the different corals we saw, the most striking being large almost lime green brain corals. Missing were the brilliant reds, yellows and oranges of east, but there were plenty of shades of brown and purple to contrast the green.

The fish were the big surprise. Our old favourite the parrot fish was there in numbers, but after that, the fish were quite different. I’m no fish expert so I won’t attempt to name any of them, or even give a decent description, but most were new to me. There were also quite large ones, many examples well over 50cm in length and quite round and fat too! Many travelled in large schools. Izzy’s favourite she called the aboriginal fish, coloured as if by ochre in earthy tones and dots and stripes. The fish also made up for the relatively dull coral colours, being bright colours, in blues, yellows, oranges, greens, purples, browns, and some wild combinations in stripes, dots and splashes. one of my favourites was schools of quite large fish, perhaps 40-50cm, and around 60 in a group. They were basically your plain silver fish, giving hints of colour at certain angles, but with a long ribbon forked tail. The striking part of the fish was that they seemed to have one, two or three black spots on each side, perhaps 50mm apart. I wonder what the differences indicate?

Other animals were giant clams, in browns mostly, star fish in reds and browns, but some with 6 legs? I wonder where they came from! We saw many different sea slugs, sea snakes. No sharks though, which is what Ningaloo is famous for.

We snorkelled in two main places. Turquoise Bay is, most strikingly, turquoise and the snorkelling is in a lagoon in a sweeping bay. The second place was lakeside which is just outside a shallow lake in behind the dunes. There were a number of other possible places, but we chose not to do them because they were either not suitable for children, it was the wrong tide, and basically because you can only do so much.

So after returning our hired gear we were lucky to be able to spend some time watching an osprey attending to chicks, while it’s partner looked on from a nearby post. Then it was back to book the glass-bottom boat tour for tomorrow, now a high priority, time to cook a  Rogan Josh to replenish energy stocks, before heading up to the lighthouse lookout. It really was a stunning setting to watch a sunset, with numerous pods of whales playing under the clear sky. The lighthouse, anchor and World War II radar emplacement providing props for some dying light photographs.