Having a whale shark of a time in Ningaloo Reef

While Australia is famous for the Great Barrier Reef, the Ningaloo Reef is relatively lesser known, but it is not lacking in saturation and sea life, writes Rishad Saam Mehta.

My old friend, the Indian Ocean, which laps the southern shores of my country, is as bright a blue as Frank Sinatra’s eyes and twinkling with similar playfulness. This is quite fitting because today, I am poised to partake in an activity that those inundated with ignorance would term as Somethin’ Stupid! I don’t blame them because the moment you mention ‘shark’ and ‘swim’ in the same sentence Jaws comes to mind. But let me set the record straight right here, right now. The whale shark is a gentle and graceful giant. I am in a boat off the coast of Exmouth, Western Australia that is a two-hour flight north of Perth.

While Australia is known for the Great Barrier Reef which is off the coast of Queensland in the east, the Ningaloo Reef here is relatively lesser known. But it is not lacking in saturation and sea life. The nutrient-rich corals are teeming with fish and I have just finished a spot of snorkelling during which I have spotted a giant manta ray, a lemon shark, a puffer fish, a threadfin butterfly fish and a harlequin filefish amongst others. But the real point of that snorkelling session was to practice for the main show. My motley bunch of fellow travellers and I were picked up from our digs in Exmouth. The friendly driver of the van Lien, who is from Ghent in Belgium, and will also be our swim lead later in the day, drove us to the jetty from where we took a little motorboat to Jazz — the big boat that took us out to the Ningaloo Marine Park.

During our snorkelling session, Lien instructed us on how to slip into the water from the boat and make a straight-line formation parallel to her hand and then swim in that formation maintaining a uniform gap. As you will see, there was a reason for such military-like precision manoeuvres.

Now, as we are all sitting in the boat that is hardly being rocked because the sea is so calm, the skipper is busy at work. He is in constant contact with the single-engined plane flying above. That is our single-engined spotter aircraft. The crew in the aircraft have their eyes peeled on the blue water below. They’re looking for whale sharks that inhabit these waters. The sudden roar of the twin engines going full throttle and the feel of Jazz leaping forward with a sense of urgency tells everyone onboard that a whale shark has been spotted and its location has been communicated to the skipper. We speed towards that location like a torpedo boat on a mission and when we arrive the skipper cuts the throttle and Lien earnestly tells everyone to gear up and get ready. There are 20 of us on board divided into two groups of 10 and I am in group one. The 10 of us sit in excited anticipation at the rear of the boat — masks, fins and snorkels in place. Our photographer, who is the spotter on the boat, has already jumped into the sea. Now he raises his hand in what is clearly an affirmative sign and Lien jumps in and asks us to follow. We do that and get into formation as we had previously practised and Lien says “DIVE”. I put my head under the water and look in Lien’s direction and what I see takes my breath away even though I am prepared for it. From the blue depths, a giant whale shark comes swimming in my direction. The sunlight bouncing off its spotted hide because it is just under the surface brings to mind ‘Nautilus’ the enigmatic submarine from Jules Verne’s’ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. All of us are so stunned by this magnificent sight that fills the field of our vision that we all momentarily hang in the ocean in limbo. Lien’s cries of ‘Swim! Swim! Swim!’ break through the fence of fascination and we are spurred into action and with limb flailing we start swimming in a straight line alongside the whale shark. The shark itself is the epitome of calm, unbothered with the excitement it is causing and continues to regally swim just below the surface its massive tale swishing lazily left and right. For me, it is almost spiritual. I have never experienced swimming so close to something so prominent in the sea.