Tuesday 28th October – Denham Shark Bay – Fine Cloudy Windy

No sun today!   After three months we experienced total cloud cover!

 

We headed over to Monkey Mia to see the dolphin feeding and take our wildlife cruise.  The owner of the Blue Dolphin Caravan Park gave us the heads up on requesting a two for one seniors concession on the cruise, so we only paid for one and both went :) Even the skipper asked Glen how he managed that one.

 

Feeding of the dolphins:  They tell everyone to get there early and it’s very crowded (142 people) and within the hour they had a second feeding with 20 people.  A cup of coffee is $5.95 (brewed).  We have to agree with some of the visitor comments.  It is over rated.

  































Directly above are file photos:  Aristocat 2            The dugongs we were looking for.

The catamaran was great, smooth even in the choppy overcast conditions. It was almost impossible to spot anything with the wind and cloud.  We saw two in total and the skipper even stayed out an extra hour.  We visited a floating pearl farm and learnt how pearls are seeded.  That was very interesting and informative.  We saw quite a few dolphins and turtles.  It was a excellent trip even though it was far from ideal conditions.



Blue Lagoon Pearl Farm

    

This pearl farm had a method of growing pearl around gold and opal.
 

If you are interested here is the website:  http://www.bluelagoon.com.au/

 

To save having to clean the pearl shells monthly, they invented a wax which covers the shell and prevents algae from growing on it.  They then discovered that the wax when put in a fish tank/swimming pool/ water trough/ dam -  prevents any algae from growing.  We bought a block for our fish pond.  We saw first hand (by accident) at the local cafe how good it is.  They have a fish pond in there and we recognized the block of wax and that pond was clean, but the one without the block of wax was full of algae. It wasn’t advertising, it was something that they were using.   http://www.thewatercleanser.com.au/  Absolutely a brilliant product. If you have a swimming pool it greatly reduces the amount of pool chemical required.

 

 
This was our first false alarm for a dugong, a splash, a shape in the distance, we were desperate to find a dugong.  Mind you there are 14,000 dugongs in the bay.

This is all I could get trying to photograph a dugong on a cloudy day and it comes up for a mere second to grab a breath of air.  So now you know why I gave you a file photo, there was no chance of recognizing what is in the above photos.

I did manage a rough snap on my phone of the Emu with 10 chicks. They were outside the caravan park when I was going across to the resource centre.