Coral Bay 1 (May 2015)

We arrive at Coral Bay and have booked a tour with the right provider in Coral Bay to have a snorkel with the giants of the ocean. It’s an interesting place with touristy and laid back atmosphere. We have to manoeuvre our Bus carefully onto the camp site, because it’s quite narrow, but we manage. 

The Nigaloo reef starts right from the beach, all you have to do is put your fins on, wade into the water until you’re knee deep and start snorkelling. The colours are fantastic, the variation in corals is mesmerising and the fishes are at least as beautiful as the fellow fishes of the Great Barrier Reef. We do some serious snorkelling training with Tim, Peter, Jaap and Laura. She doesn’t need any training, because she is actually a mermaid. She has asked for a lead-belt so she can do better surface dives. 

We have planned for Jolmer to swim with Laura and Tim, and I will take Peter and Jaap. I decide to practice a few formations, ways we hold each other, either simple hands, or elbows, or I grab their upper arms. I want to see what works so when we are all in the water with an eight meter long shark, we can signal each other and change formations easily. We also practice doing short sprints, because the animal cruises at quite a high speed for snorkelers and we want to see as much of it as possible. 

While we swim with some of the kids Pieter and Els look after the others. Then it is their turn to enjoy the beauty of this underwater paradise.

 When we all report early in the morning for our big day, it turns out there is a technical failure of the fuel connection on board the ship, and we cannot go, unless we want to swim with Manta rays? We think of our options and decide to go to Exmouth for a couple of days and return to Coral Bay later in the week for a rain check. You should have seen the sheer disappointment on our kid’s faces. This is a slightly bitter lesson in becoming adaptable and flexible in dealing with set backs and disappointments.

But hey, nothing lost; we’ll be back later.