Tag Archives: Shark Bay

We stayed at the caravan site in Denham again last night; the free camps just outside town are requires a permit which can’t be issued for consecutive nights.  So we are alternating between a paid for pitch in town and the free one’s down the coast. It’s not clear whether there is a commercial motive behind this restriction or simply a shortage of sites;  in fact tonight Eagles Bluff is full and we are allocated at site at Fowlers Camp a little further down the coast.  The weather seems to have recovered from the cold snap and the temperature hovers around 25 degrees when the sun is out but  it becomes quite cool at night.  Dark rain clouds are dropping rain further up the coast, but fortunately they are not heading this way.

We did some laundry this morning but didn’t have time to dry it before having to leave our pitch.  So we spend the morning on the edge of little lagoon just outside town.  To onlookers we must look like gypsies with our washing strung out across the sandy parking area!  Little Lagoon is an ancient barrida – a long-dried lake which has become flooded by the sea.  The undulating shrubland of Shark Bay is dotted with these dry, circular depressions from a long-ago age.  The lagoon is a pale blue fringed by a white sand beach.  In the afternoon we walk along the mangrove-lined creek that links the lagoon to the sea.  The tide is coming in creating the odd sight of its fast moving, crystal clear flowing away from the sea.  There is a narrow, deserted beach at  the mouth of the creek and we sit a while enjoying the gentle lapping of the waves and the sun on our skin.

Fowlers Camp turns out to be a picturesque campground on the edge of a very shallow and sheltered bay.  Mangroves grow in the shallows and a long sandbar is revealed at low tide.  In the late afternoon the fish are jumping and the quiet is broken by the occasional plop as they break the surface of the water.   Andy manages to catch one, but too small to keep.  This too, turns out to be a popular spot tonight, with several other vans parked up for the night. 

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A very early start this morning sees us up well before dawn and on our way to Monkey Mia about 50 km from our overnight camp at Eagles Bluff for the feeding of the wild dolphins. The dolphins have been coming to Monkey Mia every morning for their breakfast since the early sixties.  They come right up to the beach to be fed and this morning there are a pod of 11 – three generations  of three family groups the oldest being around 35 and the youngest five years old.  Now the whole spectacle is commercialised, contained and controlled by the rangers, unlike the days when people could come here for free and swim with the dolphins unfettered by rules and regulations.  All of which are, of course, in the interests of humans (who apparently have an uncanny knack of getting bitten when they put their fingers in dolphins mouths) and dolphins who were being harassed and fed the wrong diet and as a consequence weren’t looking after their young or foraging for themselves.  Nowadays, it costs $6 to enter the small resort area known as Monkey Mia and there is well-defined and regulated feeding ritual.  The dolphins arrival is heralded by two pelicans that know the drill and want a bit of the action.  At 7.30 am on cue the first of the dolphins arrive, soon to be followed by several more.  Over the next half-an-hour the ranger takes us through his patter about the history of Monkey Mia and some interesting facts about dolphins all the while the dolphins wait patiently, swimming up and down the shallows only a few feet from the expectant crowd.  At eight o’clock about half-a-dozen volunteers appear with buckets of fish, the small crowd step back out of the water and the feeding begins.  (In the meantime the pelicans being distracted by another volunteer who craftily has a decoy yellow bucket of fish at the back of the beach;  the pelicans wait patiently  for their feed unaware of this subtle deceit)  Selected members of the crowd are invited to hand feed the dolphins including Andy.  The feeding of the last fish is synchronised to prevent the oldest dolphin from stealing from the others.  The buckets are filled with water and emptied into the sea;  this signals to the dolphins tat the feed is over and immediately they head back out to sea.  Feeding time is over.  Until the dolphins decide to come back, which they do about 10 minutes later and the whole ritual begins again.  The dolphins are fed up to three times a day as long as they come back before midday and the amount of fish they are given is strictly controlled.  .An experience definitely worth making the 100 km detour to Shark Bay and much better than dolphin-watching from a boat.

We spend the rest of the day at Monkey Mia walking along the beach, sun bathing and fishing.  The weather is as good as a hot English summer’s day and this is a very pleasant place to spend it doing nothing much.

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