We spent the last two days discovering the area around Shark Bay.
On our way there, the first stop was at Hamelin Pool, a place where some of the last remaining Stromatolites can be found. They are microorganisms that look like your average stone. But they are much more than that.
Their species evolved more than 3 billion years ago and they were the first organisms to produce oxygen, thus being the enablers for many other life forms.
Our next visit in Shark Bay was an aquarium where we saw some of the local fish in big tanks. The tour guide explained everything really well and we got to see some interesting creatures. But the best part was the shark feeding.
The guide put a large fish at the end of a rope and then let it down into the water. The sharks instantly came there and tried to get it, but he pulled it away every time, explaining that this bait has to last the whole day. But eventually one shark jumped at the bait and got it, still hanging on the rope. After some time he managed to disappear with the bait.
The next day we went to Monkey Mia. People had been giving us so many dates when the feeding of the dolphins was said to occur, that we got confused and decided to be there at the first possibility, 7.45am. This was quite a good decision, as we quickly discovered that there are in fact no set feeding times. They will just wait for the first group of dolphins to appear and then start the feeding.
After waiting for a long long time, finally four dolphins showed up and some people from the crowd (over 150 were watching) were chosen to give fish to the dolphins.
The feeding finished right on time for our boat tour, a cruise on the Aristocat 2. We were almost alone when the ship departed. The only other people were two french girls (who were busy taking photographs of each other during the whole trip) and a french family.
After we helped to set sail we visited a pearls farm, fed some fish, saw lots of dolphins, dugongs and even a big turtle. On our way back, we tried the advertised attraction, “boom netting”. We climbed onto a net behind the ship, hanging slightly in the water. Then the ship started to move. Starting quite slow, it moved faster until the french girls had enough and climbed back on deck.
Then it started again and we encourage the captain to go “Faster! Faster!”. He does. After a while we were almost flying above the water and the waves began to hurt as they hit us. But we had a lot of fun.
After quite a long while even we had enough of it and went back onto the deck as well. Shortly after that we saw the first sharks (the bigger one is 3 metres long!) and were quite happy to be not too close to them any more.