Turtle Interference

In reaching 'Coral Bay', we had driven another 300 kilometres and crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. This tiny town is famous for being one of the most beautiful holiday destinations in Western Australia, and as the southern gateway to the Ningaloo Marine Park.

At 300km in length, the 'Ningaloo Reef' is the largest fringing coral reef in Australia and is the only large reef in the world that is found so close to continental land mass. At Coral Bay, the reef starts only a dozen flipper strokes away from the shore, and as a result, a tiny town 1100km north of Perth has become a Mecca for snorkelling addicts everywhere.

A few seemingly autonomous patches of coral quickly becomes a lush landscape of variety as you move further from the shore. Networks of a pastel-red branchlike coral cover 10m squared areas, and then stop to reveal bright coloured fan formations. As the type of coral diversifies, so does the variety of fish. What appears to be only coral at first glance reveals a busy maze of traffic swimming all around and in between each formation. Companies were charging unsuspecting tourists (& those that didn't want to get wet), over $150 for viewing tours, and all you had to do was swim fifty metres.

Other companies were capitalising on promises of seeing some of the wonderful wildlife in the bay. From Turtle tours at just under $200, to Whale Shark tours at $340, if there was an animal on the reef, there was an organised tour to try and find it. We had previously decided that we'd like to see turtles here, but $200 each, was a little hard to justify, so we put our masks and snorkels back on and searched the reef ourselves.

Within 5 minutes of our second snorkelling endeavour, we simultaneously spotted a turtle just a few metres away. It looked amazing. By simply doing what it does every minute of every day, it held our attention for as long as we had the energy to follow it. For the next hour, we swam alongside it around the bay, watching it's every graceful movement.

I have been fascinated by turtles ever since being a small boy. On one holiday, the island we were on had a turtle rookery on it. We'd missed the hatching, and saw no turtles, but from that moment on I wanted to see a turtle in the ocean. From the first second we saw the turtle in Coral Bay, I became that little kid again.

It seemed perfectly at ease with our company and was even so comfortable as to let me stroke it's head and feel the texture of it's shell. Of course, you're not supposed to get this close, and certainly not supposed to touch them, but the turtle didn't seem to mind, so what does it matter?

We'd just saved around $400 by ignoring the tours and finding one ourselves. From the markings on it's shell, I believe it was a Loggerhead Turtle, which is the most endangered species in Australia - not only had our luck found us a turtle, but it found a particularly rare one. We were now avid fans of Coral Bay.