WHALE SHARK!

Hi everyone!
Things have been really busy here and the internet, although existant, is really slow but I promise that I will post soon about CCC life here at Napanto Dive Resort.

However, I had to tell you right away about the coolest day I had yesterday. As the title suggests I went on a Whale Shark spotting trip. Whale Sharks are the biggest fish in world and are massive. Although they mainly live in the open ocean they do come and feed closer to shore every so often and it just so happens that my part of the Philippines is one of the places where they do this! So we all got on the boat yesterday morning and went off to a neighbouring island called Limasawa. Before we had even got to where we were picking up a couple of other people (some scientists working on Thresher Sharks) we saw one! (Well Jessie, one of the boat boys did.) Everyone lept in with their fins, mask and snorkel and swam toward it. I managed to catch up with the Shark's tail for a while but it was just a bit too fast and I couldn't keep up. It was prety amazing all the same.

When we got to the bay they was more excitement and another dive boat was also there. It turned out there was a Shark in the bay. So, once again, we all got in the water. This time the Shark was swimming much slower so it was easy to keep up with it. It was so beautiful with its white spots and looked so graceful in the water even though it was so big. The Shark was only a small one at about 5 meters. We stayed snorkelling with it for what seemed like forever but was probably about half an hour before it swam away into the blue. It was all a bit chaotic because all the fishing boats came out to see too. Hopefully the pictures that some of the group took can be used by the Whale Shark Project to help identify and track these amazing creatures as they travel around the world. He also had a scar on his head that it turned out was from when the municipality boat had hit it with its propeller a few days earlier. But the shark was so tough that the propeller was bent and the wound had healed really quicky (quicker than the local embarresment I guess). Then just as we were leaving another was spotted. This time it was a bit bigger but quickly went deeper.

A Whale Shark (but not the one we saw...)

http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/upload/2007/04/Whale-Shark-01_about_utila.jpg

In the afternoon we had a picnic in a little cove with beach and a medow above it with plam trees all around. It just looked like the pictures you get in travel magazines!

I was so tired at the end of the day but it was such an amazing expereince. I hope that I will get to see more (bigger) Whale Sharks while I'm here although I'm not sure about when the season ends. But I am happy to know that my name is now written on the Whale Shark bar on site.

Abi

xxx

P.S. Although they are massive and they are sharks Whale Sharks aren't dangerous - in fact they eat plankton. But not many sharks are dangerous anyway and this is something that CCC is working with the community on - to try and educate people that sharks are not scary!