Whale Sharks at Gladden Split

[Terry]

Posting in transit from Placentia, Belize, on our way out to Belize City and thence home. Four days of diving, each involving two hours of bumpy, wet, small boat travel out past the barrier reef. The payoff - five whale sharks sited, including a thirty footer close enough to touch, and some incredible video. Stay tuned for a full report.

[Dale]

will there be pictures?

[Terry]

There will (assuming I can figure out how the upload function works). And there will, of course be (shameless plug alert) the UnderwaterMotion DVD "Dive Belize", onsale online, via Amazon.ca, or at Burton's later this year. But first...the story.

Our routing was Toronto-Miami-Belize City-Placencia. I've been to Belize many times before, but never to Placencia, a tiny Garifuna town of 500 on the coast. Not a lot there. But two hot and bumpy hours offshore is a break in the barrier reef that leads to Gladden Split, a passage favoured by whale sharks from April to June.

The area is very controlled: no more than three dive boats in the split at a time, and a limit on the number of divers in the water.

We were told that there were no guarantees, but than roughly half the divers had the opportunity to actually see a whale shark, sometimes at a distance and sometimes close up. We had booked four dives. As it turned out, we were among the lucky.

Swells were about six feet, so we entered and got below surface as quickly as possible with a DM and group of 8, and dropped to 80 ft. We were in the blue...no visual referents except the surface. It only took about ten minutes to find a schools of cubara snappers, which attract the whale sharks. We parked about twenty feet above the school and waited. First shark spotted was a small bull shark below the snappers. Then a large white blur. And there it was...a twenty foot whale shark rising slowly toward the surface, about fifty feet from our camera. From above and below, you see the "whale" part - broad, flat head and wide body. From the side, in profile, it's all shark - high dorsal fin, vertical tail and sinuous motion.

It circled our group, then lost interest and swam out of site. Good video, but not great: too much of the shot was obscured by clouds of divers' bubbles.

Second dive, nothing but snappers. No big ting, as they say: we were pretty happy with our footage.

Day two, butt and spine a bit sore from the six hours of open boat travel so far. Dive one, two whale sharks, both very large, spotted beneath the Cubara, but no decent video - the auto focus, of course, won't let us shoot through the school. Dive two, a long swim through the blue. We were just doing the mental adjustment ("Oh, well, we saw our sharks, got pretty good shots, nice dives...") when a thirty footer rose through the snappers, right in front of the camera, circled twice directly above us, and sank back into the blue. Mission accomplished.

The rest of the dives were fun, but not spectacular. All the good diving in Belize is at least an hour offshore, and perhaps the fact that we STARTED with whale sharks made us a little blas?. But the viz was mediocre (about 70 ft.); the reef, while encouragingly healthy, wasn't especially interesting, and there wasn't all that much to see (apart from a nice loggerhead) The between-dive snorkling on shallow reeflets was actually more exciting, with rays, nurse sharks, and squid.

Other trip notes for your visit to Placencia:
- when dining at Francis Ford Coppola's Turtle Inn, have the dark chocolate cake melt dessert.
- the four hour (NOT two and a half) ride over corduroy roads to the abandoned Mayan temple at Xunantunich is definitely worth the effort. The three hour (NOT one) ride to Monkey River is not.
- when applying sunblock prior to a long open boat trip, don't forget that little square of skin in the middle of your upper foot that isn't covered by your sandal. Ouch.

Now let's see if I can figure out that picture thing.

[scubagirl]

Sounds like you had a good trip. Can't wait for the photos/video.

[Terry]

Three shots in the gallery now.