Shark Bay

 

From Carnarvon we drove to Denham. Denham is the largest town on Shark Bay and about 28 km from Monkey Mia. We spent one night in Denham and had a wonderful site at the Denham Seaside Tourist Village with a view of the ocean. Shark Bay was discovered by Dutch Explorer, Dirk Hartog in 1616. Another Dutchman revisited the area and named it Shark Bay due to the number of sharks spotted in the waters.

We made a few stops along the road Denham. First stop was visiting the Stromatolites in Hamelin Pool. The living microbes that build Stromatolites in the highly saline waters are similar to the earliest forms of life dating back 3000 million years. These amazing colonies of bacteria have helped scientists better understand evolution.

Next stop was Shell Beach. The beach has been created by hundreds of millions of tiny sea shells collecting in an area of about 120 km. The shells can be up to 10 metres deep. It is believed that these shells have been deposited here for 4000 years. They are small cockle shells that occur in the super saline waters of the bay.

The view from Eagle Bluff is pretty spectacular!

Our campsite

We also visited Ocean Park while in Denham. We took a guided tour of the marine life and watched the shark feeding.

Sea snakes need to drink freshwater (which they do when it rains over the ocean). They need to breathe every 90mins.

Moray eels find a cave under a rock and most never come fully out for the rest of the lives. They sometimes grow too big for their holes and actually can’t ever get out. They still survive because they can eat, but they can’t reproduce.

Blow fish like bright shiny things and a lady lost her toe a week ago at Coral Cove while snorkelling over the reef. She was wearing a toe ring on the toe that was eaten. We were then told that it actually isn’t that rare for people to lose toes to blow fish – and they always had a toe ring on. They will also take chunks out of brightly coloured flippers. Glad that I didn’t know this before we went snorkelling in our fluro yellow flippers!!

Shark feeding