Holiday day 6 Monkey Mia (Shark Bay)

We started the day early with the dolphin feeding session run by the Department of Environment and Conservation who look after the park. All the tourists lined up with our feet in the water and the biologist walked up and down telling us about dolphins while the ones who were coming to feed swam around waiting for their fish. 

The feeding started in the 1960s with a fisherman who got friendly with some dolphins – after a while it got out of hand, and then DEC took over and brought it back under control. Now there are only a few dolphins who are still fed, and they are only given 15% of their daily food so they still have to do their own fishing. At a certain point, some of the females were spending all their time at the harbour getting fed and thereby neglecting their babies, who starved because they didn’t get mother’s milk and didn’t learn how to catch their own fish. This doesn’t happen any more, but I guess they keep doing a bit of feeding because it brings in the tourism and links up with the dolphin research. Only a select few got to hand over a fish, and we are not allowed to touch the dolphins even though they come quite close and look very cute.

The rest of the day was lazy, hanging out at the beach or in our little holiday flat. Chris and Sol tried snorkelling this morning but it was too silty to see anything. We rented a pedal boat and played around in that for an hour. Chris and I went for a walk along the beach; walking in sand sure is tricky, though better than walking on shells in bare feet. We have mostly managed to avoid sun burn, just a few little spots where sunscreen wasn’t properly applied have come up red. Sol is finding the salt water a bit itchy on his skin, and it makes all of our hair look a bit like straw – but it’s a small price to pay for the lovely relaxing water and sunshine.

We have also been treated to some wildlife sightings on land. There is an emu that has wandered through the resort a few times, and this evening we got to watch an echidna rooting for ants with its cute long snout – it almost looks like a finger, it’s so long, thin and delicate. 

We also spotted a manta ray in the water while playing Waboba this afternoon – the silt had cleared up enough to be able to see more under water life.