Ry’s report Exmouth – Monkey Mia



This is Picolo with her two week old baby Piper.





This is a turtle nest.

 We drove into Exmouth and I felt sick, I had a cold.  We wandered down on the beach to see what there was and we saw lots of mating turtles.  They were really funny because the girl was smacking the boy in the face with her flipper.  We also went into the Ningaloo Reef National Park where we did a lot of snorkelling.  It was really cool.  Mum, dad and I got to swim with a green sea turtle it was amazing.  There were also lots of different types of fish.  My favourite was all the pretty parroties.  There was one that had lots of fluoro colours I dove down to it but it swam off really fast.  Tamsyn and dad got to swim with a white tip reef shark.  I was really jealous but then I got to swim with one of the fish that I had really wanted, a coral trout. They are red with blue spots.  It was a pretty good place for Taj to swim but he took in a mouth full of water first thing and then he didn’t want to swim anymore.  He ended up just going in the shallows which was good because he could still see fish there.  It was different to the GBR because it had hard coral, most of the fish were bigger though.  I liked them both the same.

You can see the turtle making her way back to the water
behind me.

At night we went to the beach to try and see if we could see a turtle laying her eggs.  As we wandered along we saw a turtle crawling up the beach, we sat down and waited for the turtle to start laying her eggs.  When they start laying their eggs you’re allowed to move within a meter of her back.  The eggs were white and really beautiful. When the turtle was making her way back down to the water we sat down to watch her go, and then she crawled right up to us and started rubbing her flipper on us.  Her shell was really smooth.  It was one of the best things I have done on this trip.



Catching Green Mud Crabs

 The next day we went to Learmonth jetty to do some fishing.  We caught lots of fish and I was talking to a guy on the jetty.  He asked me if I wanted to use his net but didn’t know how.  Then he asked me if we would like to stay at one of his houses in Exmouth.  It was much better than an expensive caravan park.  The house had an underground trampoline that was really fun, we played on that most the time.  They also brought their dog over who was really energetic and loved to play. His name was Harvey.  We liked to play fetch with Harvey and run around chasing the ball but Harvey was too quick.



Catching Tata Lizards

 As we arrived at Coral Bay I said Wow because it was really beautiful, it had lots of trees and a beautiful reef.  We went snorkelling but it was a bit rough and murky.  If you dove down you could see the fish.  We also went fishing but caught mainly longtoms that had really sharp teeth.  The next day we relaxed until lunchtime and went for another fish.  We caught mostly longtoms again.  We went fishing an hour before sunset and caught longtoms again.  When the sun went down a man caught a spangled emperor which was what we wanted to catch.  That was the start of the big bites.  We kept getting heaps of bites and they were snapping off our line. 


Catching fish

  I saw a big shark swimming across the top.  Then we got our first fish after sunset.  That night we ended up catching heaps of fish and plenty of keepers.  My favourite fish was the yellow tailed trevally.  We only kept one fish, our spangled emperor, it was over 60cm. 

The next morning dad and I went to the shark nursery.  We saw heaps of sharks.  They were mainly black tip reef sharks.  When we got back we told Mum, Tamsyn and Taj and we all walked back.  The sun glare was really bright so we had to use polarised sunglasses to see them. 

Tamsyn Dad and I went to the fish feeding on the beach.  At the fish feeding they throw in heaps of pellets and all these huge fish come in.  Tamsyn dad and I started snorkelling around all the fish.  When more people came we got pellets thrown at our feet and the fish would come and suck on your toes.  It was fantastic. 

The next day before we left we went back out to the sharks.  It was really shallow so there weren’t many sharks.  We walked out deeper and there were heaps of sharks swimming around us.  It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had.

We drove to Carnarvon to meet with some of Nannas old friends.  Sharon and David have a big catamaran that they took us out sailing on.  The sailing was really fun, we saw manta rays, sharks and other cool things.  After a morning of sailing we had a fish.  We caught heaps of fish but they were only small.  We caught two big fish, one was a Mackerel and the other was a Jew fish.  The mackerel was the biggest.  I liked sailing.

We went out to Quobba where we did some snorkelling and saw a blow hole.  The Blowhole was really cool, because the water shot up really high from underground we got drenched. 

 There were lots of crabs where we snorkelled but not so many big fish.  There were lots of angel fish and parrot fish, they were all friendly and swam right next to me.

Monkey was the best.  We spoilt ourselves and stayed in one of the motel rooms.  First thing in the morning we got up to watch the dolphins feed.  The wild dolphins come in every morning to meet the rangers who feed them a little bit of fish.  The rangers only give them a little bit of fish and only feed them in the morning because otherwise the dolphins would stop hunting for themselves.  There are only five dolphins that get feed.  They only do 10 minute interactions at the moment because they have a new baby calf that needs to be fed every 7 minutes and the mum needs to be out in deeper water for that to happen. 

 The baby was very cute, really active and loved to jump out of the water.  The baby’s name is Piper they don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet because they need the dolphin to flip onto its back to see its gender.  I got to feed Puck who is a big poser. She’s always showing off to the crowd.

Tamsyn and I were able to go fishing by ourselves because it was really safe.  We caught 26 fish in two days (hopefully Grumps reads this).  We also enjoyed the hot tub and pool.  One of the best things we did was going on the glass bottom boats.  There were these little boats for two people that had a glass bottom and we were able to drive them ourselves.  We liked driving over stingrays and fish to see what colours they were.  We even ran over a person.  It was awesome.  We also went on a big boat to see dugongs and turtles.  We saw heaps of them.  I liked it because we saw heaps of dugongs.  We had also made new friends with a family from Canada who had five kids.  They’re travelling around the world. 

Driving the glass bottom boat with Dad

 Tamsyn and I ended up taking them fishing and we had a great time.

See ya next week from Ry.