The Monkey Mia Resort seemed to be the place to be.  Although we didn’t stay in the caravan park there, we made the 25km journey from Denham almost every day of our stay in Denham.

The resort has a pretty well stocked general store and a great restaurant and bar.  We also reckoned that it had the best swimming beach in the Shark Bay area.

Dolphin Feeding Experience

People are encouraged to arrive early. There is a short briefing session explaining that the dolphins are wild and the rules for joining the experience.

We stood at the waters edge waiting for the dolphins to come in. There are only a handful of dolphins that are handfed, however there are a number of other dolphins in the area that visit the beach occasionally. It was a slow start but the dolphins eventually came into towards shore and we all moved out of the water. The volunteers then brought down the buckets of fish and entered the water. Each volunteer then chose someone to enter the water and hand-feed the fish to the dolphin. For the last fish in the bucket, the volunteer picked Emma from the crowd.

Quickly wading into the water Emma and Katy met Piccolo. Following the instructions from the volunteer Emma bent down and lay the fish on the surface of the water. Piccolo plays with her food before eating it and she rolled sideways displaying the fish clamped between her teeth before flicking her head back and swallowing the fish. Then rolling onto her side again she looked up again at Emma.

The session ended and everyone was asked to leave the beach.  We headed for the café on site and had breakfast.

There are three feeding sessions each morning that finish by midday. This is to make sure that the dolphins aren’t too distracted by the free fish to feed their young. We stayed for the second session, which seemed to have considerably less people than the first session. We watched the third and final feeding session from the pier, and got a good view from there.

Incidentally the pier was also a great place to spot the turtles and rays.

Swimming

There is no access into the water in the area reserved for the feeding experience, however the beach either side of that is great for a swim.

We were enjoying a cooling dip one afternoon when a group of around 6 dolphins came into shore. They were swimming so close that we could have reached out and touched them.   They seemed to be herding fish in towards the shallows to trap them.

They stayed swimming in and out around people for around an hour before disappearing again.