Swimming with Whalesharks I

This morning I had to get up shortly before 6 am.
I was super excited and woke up already at 5.30 am so I, in the end, stood up and started to fix breakfast. As I am going alone on this tour Kara said she will try to sleep longer. So I had a nice breakfast, talking to a family from France that we saw already a few times the last couple of days.

Kara was anyway awake early but she had a horrible night as somehow ants came into her tent and they are really mean here and attacking you straight away... So she tried to finally get them out of her tent.
Shortly before 7 am I was ready and went to the road in front of the campground to wait for my crew for today to pick me up.
They arrived shortly after 7 and then we drove to the boat ramp on the west side of the Exmouth Peninsula what took around 30-35 min as we needed to pick up two more girls on the way from another campground.

We saw some Emus on the way and the girls told us, that the dads are taking care of the little ones. The mum is taking care of the eggs but as soon as they are hatched she disappears and the dad is raising the chicks. Super interesting!
We even saw Ospreys when we arrived at the boat ramp! They have their nest here.
The stuff was unloaded was, as most equipment is always staying on board of this vessel. Our skipper was already waiting for us in a small boat to drive us over to The Jazz.

On our boat, we found ourselves a place to sit and the crew started straight away to hand over some shortys, fins, and snorkels. So we had to try on the shortys and when everyone was satisfied with the equipment they got our skipper had a shirt briefing with us about the security onboard and then it was time to leave.

Shortly after we left we saw a big group of Humpback Dolphins swimming around our boat for quite some time! The day couldn't start better 😍

First, we went to a snorkeling site, because they wanted to see how happy everyone is in the water and we should test our equipment and get comfortable as well.
We were snorkeling for around 15 min, we saw a lot of fishes and corals!
So this was a nice warm-up. Back on board, they informed us that the spotter plan is out now and looking for whale sharks and we used the time to get a briefing on how to behave in the water with a whale shark.
Most important rule: don't swim in front of the whale shark so he can always swim where he wants to.
Second important rule, keep 3 m distance and 4 m away from the tail.

And then there came the info, the spotter plane four 3!!!! whale sharks not too far away from us.
OMG, we got so excited!!!

Split up in two groups, just 10 people are allowed to swim with a whale shark at the same time, group one got ready straight away, including me.
Group two got ready after us, so we can all enter the water fast and have as much time as possible with the whale shark.
We had to sit on the floor, 4 people in a row. As they found the whale shark our skipper was driving the boat in front of the whale shark but still a bit away and the spotter got into the water to located the whale shark and show the depth and direction he is swimming to and then we got into the water.
Shortly after I saw my first whale shark!! 🥰😍
They know her and call her Pinky. She has a broken back but is living well with it for many years. She was around 5 m down and the visibility wasn't so good, so you can't see here on my pictures. But I could see her good enough. 🥰
Both groups got to swim twice with her!

After that, we drove to the next whale shark, just around 5 min away from us. But this one was diving down before we could enter the water so the spotter plane searched for the third one instead and even this one wasn't too far away.Read more