Whale Sharks...

Well despite the crazy weather and ocean conditions the Yucatan has been having lately, today's weather held out and we had a beautiful day with calm seas.

The morning started early. We were to meet up as a group at 6:30a and head to Cancun from there. My roommate and I thought we set out alarm for 6a, but we received a big surprise when a friend knocked on the door at 6:28a looking for us. Yikes! Luckily we're quick and pulled it together in under 10 minutes!

The drive to Cancun from Playa is about an hour and we headed off to the marina in vans provided by the tour company. We were all pretty excited, albeit a bit nervous (at least us divers were!) about the prospects of rough seas. The whole group took dramamine before coming today whether they thought they'd need it or not since we were going to be on the ocean for many hours today. Upon arrival at the dock, we were greeted with juice, coffee and breakfast snacks before loading up the small boats and heading out.

They told us it would probably be about an hour to get out to the feeding grounds so we all settled in for a pleasant ride. At the hour mark, they slowed the boat down and told us to start looking for dorsal fins as we rode along. We looked, and looked, and looked some more. An hour passed, then another, then another, then another and still nothing unfortunately. All of the boats out were searching hard, visiting all of the known feeding areas frequented by the whale sharks, but we never did find any. :( Very disappointing! 8 hours on a boat and all we saw was 5 sea turtles and a little reef (snorkeling).

The company was very nice and brought us lunch, snacks, and drinks but it certainly was a long day! I had my wet suit on almost the whole time to spare my skin from sun exposure, but my hands and face are still pretty burnt. I have a lovely line across the back of my hands and rings from my sunglasses. It's super attractive haha. I know our whole group is extremely disappointed that we didn't get to see or swim with the whale sharks. It was such a letdown to have a poor diving experience yesterday and then not see the sharks today that we were really looking forward to. Unfortunately that's the trouble with wild life! They don't particularly care to cooperate and it's always an unpredictable event when working with any animals, let alone wild ones that tend to live hundreds of meters below the ocean surface.