Turtle Magic

Cape Range National Park
Exmouth WA


Sorry to upset everyone but while you've all been working & checking mortgage statements, I've been swimming with turtles in clear aqua seas. This place is incredible! Today I snorkelled at a place called Oyster Stacks, which you can only get into during high tide. The visibility is heaps better than Turquoise Bay (which is just up the road), and it really looks like a magical "octopus's garden" - wonderful corals and underwater vistas. A little green turtle let me swim along with it. I also followed a white tipped reef shark, and came across another shark at Turquoise Bay. Fish kind of have "neighbourhoods" where they consistently hang out, so it's fun to visit "your" fish each day. A school of dart came up to some of us in the shallows and nibbled our fingers.

Now, the story with the masses of big turtles is that they are not getting ready to nest, they're mating and the ones on the shore are females exhausted from male harrassment (kind of like being at a roadhouse). The full moon thing was just some fanciful tourist embellishment according to the expert ranger who enlightened me.

I also forgot to mention that at Warroora we found a huge dead turtle that had been killed by a tiger shark - you could tell because it had these massive teeth marks all over its shell, and was missing its head & flippers. Duncan and I spent ages debating whether or not to gut it and take the shell but as I pointed out, it would be very hard to (a) hide it in the front seat of the ute and (b) explain to the ranger how we managed not to see the five hundred big signs everywhere saying not to take anything from the marine park.

So I wrote a poem about turtles instead:

Little turtle so divine

How I wish your shell was mine

If the ranger couldn't see

Duncan would spear you just for me

We'd boil you for a tasty soup

and scrape your shell out with a scoop

With ice it would make a handy beer cooler

something something rhymes with ooler

Add dozens of colourful fish and that's what I've been swimming with every day for a week