Day 7: Swimming with Whalesharks: The BEST Day of our Lives!!

In this entry we will show you how to have the best day of your life!!

Perhaps that statement is a bit dramatic, but this really was the greatest day ever for us: the day we swam with whalesharks. Nothing can prepare you for swimming beside a giant sea creature, and watching it move and breathe right in front of your eyes. As soon as we reached Australia, we’d heard about the opportunity to swim with whalesharks in Exmouth, and when we hit the West Coast in Perth, we’d seen nothing but non-stop ads for different tours. At every hostel, tour agent and everything in between, there were endless videos playing, or pictures on display of people swimming with the world’s biggest fish. Seeing all these pictures and videos makes you think, “Wow, that looks awesome!” but nothing compares to hovering in the vast blue nothingness of the Indian Ocean and seeing a real, massive whaleshark cruise right by you with it’s giant, gaping mouth wide open. All you can think is, “Wholly S#%@ Balls!” 

Pictures and videos can never fully do it justice. It’s almost like a religious experience (as cheesy as that sounds), the moments you spend in the water with them are so pure and full of wonder, you have to remind yourself that these creatures are in fact real. You get lost staring into one of it’s eyes, or admiring it’s beautiful markings, then you snap quickly back into reality and realize that it’s passing you by like a Greyhound Bus, and so you start kicking your fins to keep up, but you never take your eyes off it.

So here’s the set up: There’s 20 people max on a tour, which may sound like a lot, but actually isn’t. You’re split into two groups of 10, and take turns in the water with the whalesharks, so it never feels crowded, plus the break from swimming and keeping up with the whalesharks is very welcomed once it’s time for the other group to have their turn. Our group had the chance to swim with the whalesharks for a total of about an hour, which was heaps of time. After all that swimming and adrenalin coursing through your veins, you feel dead, but in a good-happy-dead sort of way. Everyone is served a lunch of sandwiches, fruit, cookies and other drinks while you pass the time screaming in each others faces about how awesome the experience was.

We went with Ningaloo Reef Dreaming, the premier eco-certified whaleshark tour company in Exmouth. We simply cannot say enough good things about them. If you’re thinking about doing this tour, you HAVE to go with them. The #1 reason why they are the best is because they own and operate their own spotter plane. That means, unlike all the other tour companies in Exmouth, you won’t have to share the whalesharks your plane finds with any other boats. It also tends to mean more time in the water with the star attraction of the Ningaloo reef.

As we mentioned in our previous entry, the week we were in Exmouth we were hit with freak thunderstorms and torrential downpours. Due to the rough weather in the sky, no other spotter planes went out that day. Ningaloo Reef Dreaming was the ONLY company to operate their tour that day. A friend of ours wasn't so lucky. She had booked onto a different tour company, and despite the fact that she had stayed extra time in Exmouth just to experience the tour, the company she went with cancelled their tours day after day. The tour guide for the next leg of our trip, Pete West, had also booked on to do the tour with another company, which cancelled his tour as well. He was crushed and as a result we were not even allowed to say the world “Whaleshark” for the rest of the trip.

The anticipation of swimming with whalesharks is unreal. You’re overloaded with emotions. You feel extreme levels of joy, fear, anxiety and the burning desire to finally get in the water already! As our boat full of men and women, old and young, from grandparents to children braved the choppy waters on a mission to find a whaleshark, a message was relayed down to the captain from the spotter plane above. A whaleshark had been spotted! The boat sped up and the deck hands all screamed out “Whaleshark!!” All at once everyone on board scattered across the boat to our snorkeling gear in a joyful panic. We anxiously slipped on fins and masks, as the deck hands led us to the back of the boat behind our group leaders in two groups of ten. We were all lined up in single-file lines as if we were soldiers awaiting attack on an enemy sub. The boat pulled into postion about 20 metres/60 feet in front of the whaleshark directly in its path. Our group was to go first. Our leader dove off the back of the boat, with all eyes on her as everyone smiled and fiddled with their gear or shuffled their feet in nervous anticipation.

Then, her fist shot out of the water. A signal to us that she had found the whaleshark. We had contact. Without hesitation, the deckhands screamed, “GO, GO, GO!” in a commanding fashion. Within moments we were off the end of the boat, every man, woman and child for themselves, as we raced our way towards the behemoth. As soon as we hit the water our eyes were scanning for the whaleshark, but there was nothing but pure, endless blue. We raised our heads out of the water, looking for the group leader to make sure we were headed in the right direction. Then dunked our heads below, hoping to get that first glimpse.

Then, there it was. A giant, toothless mouth headed right towards us. This was the most exciting, scary and amazing moment of our lives. Whalesharks are completely harmless, feeding primarily on plankton, which is strained through their massive mouths. Still, you can’t help but feel that natural, animalistic fear of something that makes you feel like a peanut floating in the sea.

While it’s completely safe for humans, Ningaloo Reef Dreaming also makes sure that the experience is non-threatening for the whalesharks. You must keep a distance of about 9 feet/ 3 meters at all times. Somehow, Matt managed to get in trouble once again by swimming to close to the whalesharks. Surprising, isn’t it?

Our amazing day continued while heading back to port. We were fortunate enough to see a pod of humpback whales breaching, a sight that will be tattooed in our minds forever. Even one of the deck hands, who gets to see this type of thing everyday exclaimed, “Holy s*#@!” You know it’s good when the people working there are left speechless. As we headed back to land, there was an overwhelming feeling that this was one of the best days of our lives.

Day 6: Navy Pier - Dive from Hell

After our sad goodbyes from the night before, we woke up to another big day. Exmouth holds some of the best scuba spots in the world. Most notable is Navy Pier, which is listed as one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. Navy Pier is a massive concrete and iron pier that shoots into the ocean and rises high above it. Underneath it lives a plethora of aquatic life; everything from sharks to tiny vibrantly colored nudibranch along with giant schools of fish that swarm in the pier’s shadows. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any of these things.

We booked the tour with an amazing dive company, but one thing they couldn’t control was the ocean conditions or the weather. We happened to arrive during one of the worst weeks of the year; it rained all week. This is a place that doesn’t see rain for years. The bad weather was a bit of a shock. We didn’t let the downpour stop us, and our tour headed out as planned around 4pm to catch the best tide conditions of the day. Our tour was plagued with problems before we even hit the water. After our briefing, we pulled away from the dive shop to head to the pier. We were given a paper that had an alphabetical list of everyone on the tour, which we were supposed to legibly sign next to our names. I emphasize LEGIBLY.

The first bump in the road of many problems came when a German father, with his son (the father was in his fifties, the son in his twenties), signed his name in an unreadable chicken scratch. There is extremely tight security at Navy Pier, because it is on a fully-functioning, American-owned and operated Navy base. We all needed to have our passports with us, and to have our signature on the page legible, or else we would be denied access. This meant the man needed to re-sign his name, and therefore we needed to turn around the bus and go back to the dive store for the dive assistants to re-print the page. Another manifest was printed and was given to the group to be signed again.

Ok, Round 2. This should have been easy; we had all done it once.

“Oh, what is that, German father? You wrote your name horribly AGAIN?? Turn the bus around!”

This is exactly what happened.

Round 3. All eyes were on the father as he carefully signed his name nice and neatly. As he passed the list on, we all released a sigh of relief. Then Cassie got the manifest, and went to sign next to her name. As she looked down the list of names she could see that the man had in fact signed his name quite legibly… in the wrong space! He signed next to her name instead. As Cassie explained the problem to the dive assistant, the son translated in German to his father. As the rest of the bus stared at him, all he could do was throw his head back, with both hands gripping his hair, and scream, “Noooooo!” As frustrated as we all were, we couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy, and the bus made one last turn around.

After driving in circles for almost half an hour, we had made it to the Navy base. After a short stop at the security gate, our list of names and signatures was approved and we made our way down to the pier. Upon arrival we were given flashlights. “You probably won’t even have to use these,” the dive assistant explained, “Maybe just a little at the end of your dive. This ended up being the biggest understatement of the year! Those flashlights saved our lives.

The jump into the water is hardcore by itself. It’s a 10 foot jump off a platform on the underbelly of the pier and that’s with all your weighty gear on. Before making the plunge we noticed the water looked very angry. As we stood there, a gust of wind blew the assistant’s clipboard with the manifest, other dive information and the company’s cell phone into the choppy sea.

We should have seen all of this as a sign, but we assured ourselves that just because it’s rough on the water’s surface, won’t mean that conditions will be bad 40 feet below, but we were wrong. It was. It was much worse, in fact. As we floated in the churning waves, below the quickly darkening skies, we gave each other the ok sign to descend. We slowly glided down, using a lengthy rope to guide us to the landing zone at the bottom, and we realized how quickly darkness was enveloping our small group. Instantly everyone had his or her lights on and we were only halfway down.

It was chaos at the bottom. There was a powerful current running its course right through our group, it was pitch black, except for the beams of thrashing flashlights, and as the people on the bottom were trying to get their bearings, other divers were unintentionally descending right on top of them. No one could tell who the group leader was, and panic kicked in. Our breaths were growing quicker as we sucked through our air supply, trying not to give in to a full-blown panic attack. Soon, we had found our guide in the murky water and he was working hard to keep our group together. He got everyone in a tight circle, and once he checked that we were all ok, he signaled to our group to slowly follow him.

A few people in our group decided to take a different route than that of our guide, and those who were following them in line (including us) were unknowingly led astray, and we were right back where we started. Lost and panicking. We decided rather than get ourselves more lost, to sit right where we were, alone in the dark, hoping our guide would come to find us. As we sat in this creepy alien environment, 40 feet below the surface, trying our best to avoid the tangle of sharp, barnacle-encrusted support beams below the pier, all we could think was, “This f-ing sucks!”. It didn’t take long for out guide to come back for us, and realizing that we were in over our heads, he led us carefully through the maze of beams and pipes in the darkness back to the starting point. Our guide once again signed to us, checking that we were ok. I wish there were a sign for “Get me the hell out of here!” Instead, we signed that we had had enough, and wanted to ascend. We slowly floated up back into the light, and lived to swim another day.

It was such a great feeling when we had made it back to dry land. As we undressed from our wetsuits, we soon found that our friend Nate was not so lucky. Somehow he had gotten lost and separated from the rest of the group. Down below, Nate had searched for his lost partner for one minute, then, as is standard when diving in a pair, ascended to the surface, where the two could reunite. By the time Nate surfaced, he had drifted out from below the pier into the open ocean where the waves are bigger, the currents stronger, and groups of Tiger Sharks were known to hunt. Luckily, Nate is an all-American, gold medalist, Olympian swimmer, who is half-man, half-dolphin and managed to swim back to safety quickly. We’ve seen him swim, he really is half-dolphin.

On the ride back all we could do was try to wrap our brains around what we had just experienced. It was all due simply to bad luck. Nature was against us that day, and she always wins. It’s a great dive site and a great dive company, but unfortunately it just didn’t work out. It wasn’t meant to be. That night at the caravan park we saw the guy who wrote his name wrong 3 times, with his son. They invited us over for beers as we recounted the day’s terrifying events and laughed about it saying “Well, at least we’ll have the story to tell.”

How We Won a $10,000 Trip Across Australia!

Hello! Or G'Day Mate!

We would like to send a HUGE thank you to TNT Down Under Magazine, OZ Experience, and to everyone who watched our video on YouTube! If you haven't seen it quite yet, what are you waiting for?? Check it out at:

OZ Experience TNT Down Under WINNING VIDEO!

And if you're still hungry for more awesome CazzMatt videos check out our incredible YouTube page to see some of the funny videos we made on our travels, like swimming with seals, ZORBing, and feeding birds out of my mouth, which grossed out my mom.

So after watching our winning video you’ll obviously see sex sells and by that I mean a fat guy running around in his underwear.

First things first, let us introduce ourselves. We’re are the dynamic duo Cassie and Matt aka CazzMatt! We both hail from the San Francisco Bay Area, we recently finished University, then took off to farm in Hawaii , from there we joined 2 good friends from the farm and backpacked all over New Zealand, and now we're working and living in fabulous Sydney.

We can't wait to get started on our AWESOME adventure all over Australia!! Basically we get what's called the Fair Dinkum Pass, which allows us to travel all over Australia for up to 6 months.

We'll start by departing from Sydney, which has been our beloved home for the past 6 months, but more importantly we're getting away from our LAME roommates! Shortly after leaving Sydney we'll arrive on the West Coast of Australia in Perth where we embark on a 10-day journey heading North to Broome, all thanks to Western Xposure. Naturally we'll be doing cool stuff all along the way like hiking through national parks, feeding dolphins in Monkey Mia, and swimming with whale sharks. Then we'll make the leap to Darwin where we'll wrestle crocodiles and swim with them in the Cage of Death! How awesome does that sound?! A CAGE OF DEATH! Crocodile Dundee would be so proud.

Then we hop on a flight to Cairns, maybe spend a few weeks there, sail the Whitsundays through the eco certified Explore Whitsundays, snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, and not pull a "Shen Neng" and run a ground on a precious coral reef.

From there our details are a little uncertain. We have the choice to take as long as we want down the East Coast, so we might take our time, maybe work, and then finish traversing down to our beloved Sydney again. We keep heading south to Melbourne, then make the swim to Tasmania, and back up to Adelaide. Lastly, we shoot up the center of OZ, while taking in the sights at Uluru (The giant red rock) and finish back in Darwin, for more CAGE OF DEATH!!

This is going to be the trip of a lifetime and we're looking forward to bringing everyone along for the ride, please make sure to subscribe to our blog and watch our ground breaking videos of our crazy adventures.

Cheers,

CazzMatt