Coral Bay

We arrived in Coral Bay on Wednesday 24th August and today is Saturday 27th August and we have spent some part of every day on the beach. All there is at Coral Bay is 2 caravan parks, some backpacker accommodation, a few holiday homes and a couple of small shopping centres.... and of course the beautiful Ningaloo Reef and associated coral and clear water. The first thing we did after arriving was to go across the road to the shops and book a trip on a semi submersible boat to have a look at the reef.

The semi submersible is a boat with a very shallow draft. You walk down underneath the deck level and sit on benches in front of big windows and look out as the boat moves alongside the reef. In glass bottom boats you look down on the coral. In the semi submersible you go alongside the coral. We booked this for Thursday morning at 10am.



This is the semi submersible boat. You go down under the deck and under water to view the fish and coral

 It was quite amazing. The coral is hard coral, unlike the Barrier Reef which is soft coral. Hard coral does not have the colour but it does have amazing structure. There is some colour, such as blue and lavender but it is mainly greens and browns.



Cabbage coral




Fish in staghorn coral




Blue tipped coral




Lavender coral

 Some of the fish around the coral were spangled emperor, scissor fish, parrot fish, wrasse, leatherjacket, damselfish, trevally, mullet and angelfish. It was just incredible.

Spangled Emperor

We stopped out on the reef to feed the fish and there was a feeding frenzy around the boat.

It was quite windy when we got back so there was no snorkelling today.

On Friday we went for a drive out to the Coral Bay Marina. The colours around the marina were amazing from the different depths of the water. There is mostly a sandy bottom near to shore so the reflections of the sky make for great colour in the water.

While walking along the jetty we seen a huge groper. It was just cruising around under and around the jetty. He was very big, probably about 5 feet long and about 200kg. There were hundreds of bait fish swimming around him but keeping clear of his mouth.

We bought some more tiger prawns for tea and bought an extra kilo to put in the freezer for later.

We decided to check up on our accommodation in Perth and when we contacted them originally, they said we could store our van and car with them for $50 per week. When we rang up yesterday it turns out that our van and truck are too big to go into their storage facility so we could leave it on the site we would be staying on for $37 a night. When we worked that out including the nights we were going to stay there it worked out to be more than $800. A bit rich we thought. Now, someone had told us that you can camp at the Seventh Day Adventist camping area in Maida Vale in Perth, so we rang them up and they will store our van and truck for $4 a night. We will stay there for 2 nights before and 2 nights after for $30 per night. They have all of the amenities and power and water. They only have a couple of rules - no smoking and no alcohol. So we will have some alcohol free days but the price is right for the storage and it is only about $25 in a cab to the airport.

Now today is Saturday and our last day in Coral Bay. We went over to the beach this morning and snorkelled around amongst the beautiful fish. We saw a huge clam in the water and all of the little tropical fish were swimming around it. It is just like swimming in a huge fish tank. The fish are very safe here as the area off the front of the beach is a marine park and no fishing is allowed, so you have huge spangled emperor swimming around you. They say they are a beautiful eating fish so they can count themselves pretty lucky that they are in a protected zone.

Tomorrow we move on to Carnarvon for a couple of days.