Another installment from my Mexico trip and another thing ticked off the wishlist!
Swimming with the largest fish in the sea – the Whale Shark…
This is something I spotted as an activity when I was looking at things to do around Playa del Carmen and Cancun in Mexico on Pinterest and I also received some information from a PR regarding official research trips to find out more about these mysterious fish (they really don’t know much for certain!). All the planets aligned as my trip coincided with the period that the whale sharks migrate and congregate offshore from Cancun, so I decided this was a must do.
Snorkel selfie – as you do!
The whale shark trips leave from Punta Sam first thing in the morning, and I managed to get on one of the commercial ones at the last minute. It takes a couple of hours to get to the deeper water where the sharks swim. During this time we were cautioned not to put on any non biodegradable sun screen. Apparently the whale sharks don’t like the taste!
Team one in position ready to jump.
When we arrived in the general area the sharks had been spotted everyone got suited up (either a wet suit or a life jacket is required to ensure you don’t drown – they do have some health and safety in Mexico!). Then we were grouped into 2’s (3’s in the case of the smaller children) and given a group number.
Each group would jump out the boat in turn and have a go swimming alongside the whale sharks. As you can see above we were literally poised for action on the side of the boat! Now there is meant to be a limit to the number of people swimming with the whale sharks at any one time – 2 plus a guide….
In reality this means maybe 2 or 3 plus a guide, from each boat. When there are plenty of whale sharks around this is fine – if there are 200 of them and only 15 boats, everyone gets several sharks to themselves.
When its 3 whale sharks and still 15 boats, you have a problem – well at least 45 people in the water at a time around one whale shark – as our guide kept saying, its like pirate law out this far from shore, no one is checking that they follow the rules…
Ready to jump over, you can see why I got sunburnt thighs…
My one photo of a whale shark – if you look closely you can see the very tip of a fin on the left hand side!
But when you get in next to the whale sharks it is truly amazing! My first jump I landed right next to it – but had to be told which way to look. As I turned to my left I almost spat my snorkel out – it was right next to me and bloody huge!!
Whale sharks can reach up to 13m long – the ones I saw weren’t quite that big, but boy does it make an impression when you’re face to face!
I could see the white spots on his skin and even the little fish that attach themselves to clean the sharks. As they feed by filtering plankton out of the water they are safe to swim with.
On my second jump I got to see another shark with his huge mouth open and filtering – this was unfortunately an area where there were lots of other people in the water and so it looked like the shark was going to scoop them up! But obviously not as its vegetarian…
Instead the shark dove deeper to get away from the humans annoying it…
Now I didn’t get any photos of the whale sharks I saw – our guide was right when he said to just enjoy the experience and live in the moment! However I have a video from a friend that shows one in action on a similar trip:
Thanks to Lluis for letting me post this!
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