Wild(Life)Swimming

Spotting whale sharks, manta rays and humpback whales in a single long weekend? On Western Australia’s Ningaloo Reef it’s possible – but only for a few weeks each year…

- Phoebe Smith

It’s difficult to know how you’d react if you were staring into the wide-open mouth of a creature the size of a bus. I say you, dear reader, because I do know how I’d react, as this was the exact situation that I found myself in on a fairly chilly July afternoon floating somewhere in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

I’d love to tell you that my heart was filled with courage and a steady camera hand was taking an award-winning picture, but the reality is that I was, in fact, struck completely paralysed and, rather than rise to the occasion, I simply floated there, as the giant jaws of the whale shark – over a metre in width – came straight towards me.

My adventure had begun earlier that day when I arrived in the town of Exmouth, access point to the Ningaloo Reef – the world’s largest fringing reef (one that’s growing from the shore so is easily accessed from the beach). Here, defence officials and oil rig workers easily outnumber the tourists and backpackers, the sort found in their hordes on the country’s more-famous reef over in Queensland, especially on a shivery day like this.

But despite July being the Australian winter, I’d chosen the month for a very particular reason. It presented the only few weeks each year when it would be possible for me to go from swimming with whale sharks one day (who hang around until August), to swimming with humpback whales on the next (as their annual migration towards Antarctica begins) and – to cap it all off – swimming with manta rays on a third (there in greatest numbers in winter). This creates an underwater megafauna trifecta unrivalled anywhere in the world. On this first day, I was here to swim with the state’s most famous underwater creature.

AIMING FOR THE TREBLE