Dolphins, Pearl Farm and boat trip

Wednesday 30^th April 2008

The wind, flapping awnings and a fear of more storms made for a fitful night but the morning dawned sunny with only a few fluffyish clouds. Going past the Francois Peron National Park turn off we saw that the road was still closed – I hope we get to go up there before we have to move on because it sounds like a great place.

A piece of general knowledge: Monkey Mia is named after one of the ‘discoverers’ of the area’s boats with Mia meaning ‘home of’.

Anyway, we headed out there, not quite as early as everyone else (what’s new?) and got there while no one was in the water. Wondering what the go was we wandered into the water as a couple of dolphins sauntered over and in a couple of minutes had a private session with three of the beautiful creatures. The ranger in the water at that time gave us a private audience for a good five minutes before other people joined us and we got some good photos of just us with a dolphin called Puck who is 31 years old and a grandmother.

The rest of her family (can’t remember daughter’s name but granddaughter was Flute) sidled in to join her, obviously fully aware of what would come their way if they hung around long enough! It was amazing to see them so close up and so exclusively – Puck lay on her side gazing up at us, completely unfazed by the fact that we were human. She seemed to be as interested in us as we were in her.

There are three families with the matriarchs Puck, Nicky and Surprise, a few daughters and a bunch of grandchildren who skittled around having a great time slightly away from the small crowd of humans now gathering. The boys go off and form gangs who ‘terrorise’ the females – no wonder they were hanging around the humans!

When a sufficient number of interested tourists had gathered a ranger came down to chat for the last time that day (about 9:30 – anyone arriving after 10 would be severely disappointed because all the literature says between 8am and 12 noon for feedings) finishing up with a feeding. Apparently both the previous feedings that day had attracted over a hundred visitors while we were a small, select group of no more than thirty or so.

After the talk, they feed, with several rangers in the water picking hopeful tourists to pass the fish by hand to the dolphins. Holly and Katie got chosen, much to Holly’s delight, but I was a bit slow with the camera so you’ll just have to take my word for it!

As soon as all the fish had been handed out the 12 or 13 dolphins that had gathered just as quickly dispersed – they obviously know the routine and knew it was time to head out to catch their own food for the rest of the day – they didn’t appear again the whole time we were there.

Having contacted Johnny’s brother, Jamie, the night before we now had a boat cruise lined up! Jamie is Johnny’s middle brother and is part of the family business of pearl farming from a pontoon just off Monkey Mia called the Blue Lagoon. He had organised for us to catch the Aristocat 2 (a catamaran that does tours in the bay) out to the Pearl Farm. Once there he gave all the tourists on the boat a run down of how a pearl farm works. It was really interesting – if you are ever buying a pearl it will never be older than 2 years – the oyster spits it out after about 2 years so they must harvest it before that. They specialise in black pearls at this farm and they are truly stunning. Even better, they have now moved into setting gold and opals into the pearl – the poor old oyster has to work on covering these annoyances up in his shell and does an extremely good job with an impressive end result. According to Johnny, Jamie has been the one to do the research to enable this.

Jamie’s itinerary for us then included staying on board the Aristocat 2, which he sorted with the skipper, and going in search of turtles, dugongs and dolphins. Holly and Katie made firm friends with three other kids on board and spent the trip running around the boat (which was, mercifully, quite large and not crowded with other tourists), stopping to gaze at the four or five turtles we saw and sitting in the boom netting at the rear of the boat as the water washed out their backsides! We didn’t see any dugongs which was disappointing but the water was still pretty choppy and they are hard enough to see at the best of times.

Upon disembarking the girls strongly suggested that we join their new friends at the resort pool and since the resort encouraged all paying visitors to make the most of their facilities, that is where we headed. The next three hours were spent with H and K alternating between the pool and hot spa with their new friends Megan, Bethan and Leon from Wales while Paul and I chatted with one set of the parents, Zac and Cath.

After disentangling the girls from the Monkey Mia resort we headed back to Denham to check out Jamie’s boat that he was lending us for a day.

His house is like the one in the movie The Castle – right next to all the power lines and sub-station. But he certainly has all the toys – the premier being a KTM – the mega, stonker one of the kind that was used in the Paris-Dakar race, one of only seven of its kind in Australia and probably the only one that has actually been raced here. Paul was offered a ride which was highly amusing for everyone else since it is extremely high and hard for him to get onto. He had to get Jamie to hold it up – not quite strongly enough, as it turns out, and in terrible slow-motion it tipped to the right and left Paul struggling beneath it on the ground. Next time he had two guys hold it and was off around the property. Apparently, it GOES!!! Jamie and Christian were ready to catch him when he returned.

Holly and Katie each had a turn on a quad bike behind Christian but I don’t think he went quite as fast as Geoff! The other thing that H and K were really chuffed about was seeing Jamie’s dogs Black Dog and Misty the puppy again (we’d met them in Kalbarri where they were staying for a couple of nights at the same time as us).

Dinner was in the camper trailer – getting better at this game all the time – before an early retirement to bed.