This is the day that everyone on the boat has been waiting for. Seeing a whale shark is a gold star on almost every diver's check list. It is a huge and impressive creature and the best way to find one is to spot it from the surface on your boat before diving in the water.
So the way we do it is that we snorkel first. The boat crew will sail around and keep their eyes peeled for a whale shark, when one is spotted we all jump off the boat and swim as fast as we can to get to it. With any luck you will have jumped into the path of the whale shark and it will swim to you. Trying to keep up with one is impossible. If it wants to get away there is nothing you can do to follow, it can swim fast and go deeper than any human.
We weren't the only ones there either. There were three other boats with snorkelers looking to swim with a whale shark. In the end there must have been at least 60 people swarming around this whale shark, and this whale shark (large as it may seem) is just a baby. I did not feel good about this at all.
so after the weird sensation of snorkeling in a a group of 60-odd people like a school of fish (seriously people were swimming over each other to get a look at this whale shark) we went for a much more sedate and relaxing dive. After the snorkeling the ocean suddenly seemed much larger.
We spent a good hour swimming around trying to find or spot another whale shark. When we first got in the water we had an idea of what direction one of the whale sharks had gone in and tried to enter the water in its path, but this didn't quite work out.
We did seem some fun fish and various types of corals but the whale shark remained elusive. The dive ended with very little fanfare. One thing I did notice though was that there was an awful lot of boat traffic in the area. You really had to be careful when you came back up to make sure you didn't get run over by a boat!
Anyway, we hoped to have better luck on the last dive of the day, and oh boy did we ever! It was completely random, but suddenly as we were swimming along, someone saw something and the whole group started swimming. Hard. I figured this must be it and go my camera ready. I was not quite prepared for the size of the creature (still a baby too!) but it was enormous and it came right at me, you cant really tell in the video, but it was very close to me. Thats the magic of wide angle shooting, everything still seems far away.
But I got this screen shot out of the video, which is arguably my favourite shot of the entire trip! I was also able to get some footage from one of the other divers, the one with the white shorts in the bottom left of the above shot. See his position, I got the video he filmed at that moment. He got incredibly close!
Thiiiiiiis close!
After that encounter we headed back to the boat which for the duration of our whale shark search was moored in this here harbour:
It was pretty quiet though busy as you could tell there was a lot of building going on on this island. I fear that they are probably building hotels and things based on the whale shark sightings in that particular area. Though that could become a problem, too many people in the water swimming around these sharks and they will just find somewhere else to go. You see whale sharks live and feed in the deep, but the come up to the shallows where we were every now and then to warm up again before heading back into the depths. They can quite happily find other shallows.
So the day ended a roaring success with lots of people excitedly sharing their photos and video from the last dive. It really was quite something! I certainly have never experienced it before. I had seen them on documentaries before but never did I think I would see one in the wild, up close myself.
Check out the previous posts in this series:
1.Maldives Trip - Day 1: The Epic Journey Begins!
2.Maldives Trip - Day 1: The Boat
3.Maldives Trip Day 2 - Looking for Manta Rays
4.Maldives Trip - Day 2 - Shark Encounter
5.Maldives Trip Day 3 - Reef Exploration
6.Maldives Trip Day 3 - Things don't go to plan
7.Maldives Trip Day 4 - Sea Turtle Sighting!
8.Maldives Trip Day 4 - The Jellyfish Monster
9.Maldives Trip Day 5 - The Kudimah Wreck
!steemitworldmap 3.466825 lat 72.837106 long Maldives Trip Day 5 - Searching for Whale Sharks D3SCR
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