Whale Sharks!

Boy are those things big! We drove to the island of Holbox on Monday with a couple of friends. We played at the beach and basically bummed around on Monday evening. After the six hour drive, it was kinda nice to just bum. The mosquitoes about carried us off. And they said it is not even mosquito season right now.

Boats on the beachThe hotel where we stayed was right near the beach. Not on the beach, but I don’t think walking a block was asking too much to get there. The water was very warm right near the shore, but as we got further out, it cooled off. You could walk out a long way before there was any significant drop off in depth. With the water calm as it was that evening, it was a great place to just swim. I enjoyed swimming until it felt like my arms were going to fall off. The visibility was pretty poor so we had trouble finding one of our snorkel and goggle sets when it was lost in 3.5 feet of water.

Tuesday morning we met with our tour boat. We took a 2 hour trip to where the whale sharks should have been. They don’t stay in the same spot from day to day, so you just have to get close to where they were seen yesterday and then putt around till you find them. There were 14 boats at one point looking for the whale sharks. We found some, but they did not stay at the surface. So we all spread out and started looking. Finally we caught up with a couple that stayed at James and David ready to jump in.the surface and let us swim with them. They were huge. We did not have the biggest ones to swim with. The one I got to be with was about 15-18 feet long. Some from our group were with one that was about 20-22 feet long.

We had some underwater disposable cameras. I will get those pics up soon. I hope they turned out nice. We did not have very good visibility to get good pictures. Also, you could not get far enough away from them to take a good picture and understand their size. I dove down to get a picture from underneath the shark, but when I got low enough to take a picture, I could not see the whale shark. It was just too murky.

Great trip. If you get the chance, then it is worth the time to do it. I don’t know what the going rate for the trip is as our friends that we went with do promotions for different tours and hotels. They got their trip free by going with this company and we paid about $65 (USD) each. The company we went with, Monkey’s Tours, were very professional. I imagine they are the most expensive tour company there.

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