I didn’t have to be across the road at the dive shop until 8 today so I had a lie in. Then I made porridge with milk and finally used up the oats I’ve been carrying since I gave up on porridge for breakfast! 

I also had time to get a coffee from the bakery before getting fins and a wetsuit from the dive shop and heading to the boat ramp. There were about 20 people on the tour. We stopped after about 20 minutes to snorkel. It didn’t seem that far offshore. As soon as we jumped in I could see heaps of fish. The coral is not that colourful but didn’t seem to be bleached as Mum and Dad had found on their glass bottom boat tour. We saw a turtle and bigger schools of brightly coloured fish before heading to a cleaning station but I couldn’t really see anything there.  Then we swam back over a very shallow gap in two coral bommies. There was a photographer on board so I’ll post her photos later (once I work out how to access them on my archaic phone).

It was cold in the wind back on the boat and I was glad I remembered to take my jacket. We then cruised off to look for manta rays and found them quite quickly, just after they’d finished explaining how to swim in a neat formation behind them. So we jumped in and swam in total chaos above two manta rays - a male chasing a female in a breeding ritual. They are crazy creatures with big kind of tusks and eyes on the side of them but they glide so gracefully along the bottom. We swam with them three times and each time got a little colder. But it was really amazing. 

It was also nice to take off my wetsuit and put on my jacket for good. We went looking for whales and found a mother and calf quite quickly. We could see them breathing but not breaching. Then we saw their silhouettes swim really close to the boat and continue on out. 

That meant we’d completed everything on the tour before lunch, so we had lunch as we pottered back along the shore and were  back to town by 2. 

That left all the afternoon, so I went for a walk up the beach with an English guy called Dom who’d been on the tour. He’s living in Perth and has been to Coral Bay before so he knew where the shark nursery was. To be honest, it wasn’t hard to find but I had forgotten it was there. I had a small stack on the slippery rocks but eventually made it to see tens of metre long reef sharks swimming around in the shallows. 

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 We had a beer at the bar in the hotel at the end of the road. I’m not sure what it was called. It wasn’t Bill’s.

I told Dom I’d buy him a beer to start rebuilding my karma as people give me so much stuff. It didn’t do much for my karma cause he bought a second round & when I got back my neighbours had left in the afternoon and left me a box of a big bag of peanuts, the remnants of a box of Nutrigrain, an orange, an onion and several small bottles of shampoo and conditioner. I gave Dom the Nutrigrain cause it is the one cereal I don’t like, left some of the shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom and binned the onion. My hair did feel much nicer after using the conditioner though.