Week 8 started slow but ended with a bang...

Wednesday 13th of October our two Whale Shark Research boats headed South from Anse La Mouche full of eager clients excited about the afternoon ahead.

Our first Shark of the day was a 4.5m male, a new Shark for this season and the second time we have had encounters with him. After that things got quiet....very quiet....

Whilst we were waiting our other boat (Blue Boat) had a pod of 20-30 Melon Headed Whales, they played around leaping out of the water and porposing as close as 2m away from the boat! An hour passed by with no sightings of any Whale Sharks when a call came over the radio from our very relieved pilot, Neil, that there were 7 Whale Sharks at the Southern end of Grand Anse beach.

When we got there the Sharks were in 10m of water and barely moving, we were joined by the guys from Save Our Seas in their RIB so there were 3 boats in the area. The two MCSS boats had both their groups in, all on different Sharks and the Save Our Seas guys also had their own Shark. Some of us were even lucky enough to have two Sharks together!

This was another very special day here in the Seychelles. After processing the ID shots we retrieved, through I3S we had 3 Sharks from 2010, 2 from 2005, 1 from 2007, 1from 2008 and one from 2009. In this aggregation of Whale Sharks was ‘Yogi’ one of Abi’s favourite Sharks who has been returning to the Seychelles each year since 2005!

A great ending to the week!

Post and photos contributed by Joe Daniels