Whale sharks are very much a bucket list creature for most snorkeling enthusiasts. A few reasons contributing to their fame amongst ocean lovers could be because they are sharks—the largest of all the shark species—only they don’t have the intimidating set of serrated teeth most sharks are equipped with. They spend a large part of their time hoovering up their planktonic prey on the ocean’s surface, where us snorkelers can enjoy swimming next to them, and on top of that, they are covered in polka-dots!
If you’ve ever encountered whale sharks randomly in the wild, like you’re just snorkeling along a reef and you happen to see one swimming towards you, for example, you will very likely have had the same experience everyone else has had in this same situation. You see the whale shark and get excited. It doesn’t appear to be moving fast, but as it gets closer, you soon realize it’s moving at an incredible pace despite its slow tail movements. You try to keep up with it, but after a few seconds, you are well behind it, and there’s no chance of you ever catching up. This is a very typical whale shark encounter. A few seconds of excitement, and then it disappears back into the blue, leaving you floating on the surface, questioning whether or not that encounter actually happened. In fifteen years of working as a professional guide and underwater camera dude in waters where whale sharks are known to live, I have seen a grand total of three whale sharks by chance, and the combined time I was able to spend with these three whale sharks is less than a minute.
There are many places around the world where you can snorkel with whale sharks. Australia’s Ningaloo Reef is one of the most famous, as the operators there can almost guarantee sightings since they use spotter planes to find the sharks. The only thing is that the sharks there are moving quickly as they swim up and down the coast in search of food. Encounters are brief and generally full of other snorkelers. In a few spots in Mexico, you can find some of the world’s largest congregations of whale sharks as they come to feed on masses of tuna eggs and plankton. The sharks are there to feed, so you can generally spend a good amount of time swimming alongside them, however, you will also encounter several hundred other snorkelers trying to do the same, not to mention the fact that they make you wear giant orange life jackets!
So, where can we predictably swim next to whale sharks without the hordes of other snorkelers? Well, Indonesia’s Triton Bay, Cenderawasih Bay in West Papua, along with Saleh Bay in Sumbawa, have the largest population of whale sharks in all of Indonesia. In the case of Triton Bay and Cenderawasih Bay, local regulations only allow one group to be around the sharks each day, and you can predictably swim alongside them for hours at a time since sharks are there to feed on the bait fish these two bays naturally cultivate. While Saleh Bay does have protocols in place to safeguard the well-being of the whale sharks, it does allow more people in the water with them, so you can expect to see other people enjoying the sharks alongside you. Oh, you also don’t need to wear a cumbersome life preserver if you don’t want to!
Indonesia’s Cenderawasih Bay, Triton Bay, and Saleh Bay offer unique and much more prolonged encounters with whale sharks because of a semi-symbiotic relationship formed over many decades between the sharks and unusual-looking fishing boats called bagans. For years, fishermen across Indonesia have been fishing for anchovy-like fish from bagans. These are large bamboo platforms/boats with giant nets that hang beneath the strange floating structures. At night, the fishermen lower the nets beneath the platform and then use a set of very bright lights to lure shoals of these small fish into the nets. All night, these fishermen lower and raise their nets full of fish. The smell of the concentration of fish attracts the whale sharks.
Rather than see the large sharks as a nuisance, the local fishermen appreciate the whale sharks’ presence as they believe the large animals are a good omen for their catch. Nowadays, this relationship also provides the fishermen and their communities with an additional source of income as liveaboards and resorts pay the fishermen a fee to snorkel and dive with the whale sharks around their bagans.
The way a typical bagan/whale shark snorkeling experience works is as follows. If you are on a liveaboard, the liveaboard will anchor in the bay where all the bagans are fishing, generally the night before. The following morning, well before the sun rises and the fishermen stop fishing, the liveaboard will send out one of the tender boats to find the bagan with the most whale sharks around it. The sharks typically congregate around one or two bagans. Once they’ve established which bagan has sharks, the snorkeling can commence, usually just after the sun has come up. If you are snorkeling from a resort, you will generally depart the resort very early in the morning so that you arrive at the bagans just as the sun is coming up. You’ll then search for the bagan with the whale sharks, and once found, the pool is open!
Very likely, one of the first things you’ll notice once in the water is that the whale shark or sharks are sitting vertically in the water right under the bagan, seemingly gasping for air as their mouths open and close at the waterline or sometimes above the waterline. Like all sharks, whale sharks have gills so they aren’t gasping for air, instead, they are feeding on the small fish that the bagan fishermen are now throwing back into the water to entice the whale sharks to stay around. Once the nets go up, so does the opportunity for food, and the sharks move on. However, the resort or liveaboard will make an agreement with the bagan in where they buy some of the fish they’ve caught to feed the sharks and keep them around the bagan so we can snorkel with them. With the help of the fishermen, the whale sharks will stay around the bagans all day and will often attract more sharks.
Now, I’m going to guess that there are a few of you who are thinking something along the lines of, “I don’t like the fact that the sharks are being fed; this is a manipulated encounter that could affect the shark’s natural feeding and migratory habits.”
When I first heard that the sharks were being lured in by food, I felt the same way. However, after speaking with some whale shark experts who’ve spent years studying the interaction between the sharks, bagans, and tourists, while doing a bit of my own research, my concern for the well-being of the sharks has been put at ease. You see, whale sharks aren’t migratory species, at least not in the same way some whales and many other species are, with very specific routes during specific times of the year. According to Conservation International, a global conservation agency who’s been operating a whale shark monitoring initiative here in Indonesia since 2015 using tracking devices mounted on the animals, “These whale sharks (tagged in West Papua, Indonesia) are not as migratory as many believed. They disperse periodically in different directions, covering distances up to 1,000 miles, often to return to ‘home waters’ in a matter of weeks.”
Another thing to note about the whale sharks in Cenderawasih, Triton, and Saleh Bay is that the sharks often seen in these places are adolescent males who have not yet reached sexual maturity. Two of the big factors that contribute to a species migrating are mating and food. If the whale sharks aren’t mating yet and have a bay full of food, with or without the bagans, there’s no reason for them to leave. To add to that, in a collaborative effort between Conservation International and the Georgia Aquarium to assess the overall health of the whale sharks in Cenderawasih Bay, the research teams were able to confirm that the sharks were not only healthy but also didn’t show any signs of stress as a result of the human interactions.
I think we can all agree that it would be a dream come true to be able to snorkel along reefs and predictably encounter whale sharks that we could swim alongside for extended periods of time in a completely natural setting. This is just not a reality, though, as pelagic species like whale sharks don’t just hang around reefs because reefs don’t support their food source. Again, you might get lucky with a quick flyby from a whale shark as it searches for its next meal or mate, but to predict these encounters is nearly impossible. If we want to swim alongside the largest shark in the ocean for hours at a time, the only way to do so is to go to where their food is, in this case, it’s around bagans. For us snorkelers, bagans cultivate the ultimate whale shark snorkeling experience as there is nowhere else in the world where you can snorkel alongside multiple whale sharks at a time in the wild, for hours at a time, without hordes of other snorkelers in the water with you.
Triton Bay, Cenderawasih Bay, and Saleh Bay are all are very remote regions of Indonesia, which naturally helps keep tourism at bay. It also means there are a limited number of options for snorkeling in either of these places. To snorkel with the Cenderawasih Bay whale sharks, you have to do it via liveaboard, as there are no resorts in the area. Coralia is a fantastic liveaboard and one of the few liveaboards in Indonesia running snorkeling safaris to Cenderawasih. Coralia will generally spend a couple of days snorkeling with the whale sharks around the bagans, but before and after the whale shark experience, the liveaboard will spend days exploring all the different islands and atolls, which are just brimming with tropical life.
Triton Bay–which is much smaller by comparison, can be snorkeled much more easily from a resort. There is only one resort called Triton Bay Divers and they’ve been operating in Triton Bay since 2015. From this picturesque little resort, you can not only access the bagans where the whale sharks come to feed but also enjoy the absolutely stunning reefs that the area is famous for. As this area is much smaller than Cenderawasih Bay, we usually combine the tour with another week in Raja Ampat.
Saleh Bay is accessible by land and by liveaboard. It’s only a forty-five-minute flight from Bali, but there are no reasonable resorts in the area, which is why we visit Salah Bay via liveaboard either before or after spending time in and around Komodo. Currently, we are operating with two different liveaboards, the Mermaid I as part of our Komodo & Beyond Snorkel Safari, and the Naga Biru who will be running our West Komodo & Sumbawa Snorkeling Safari.
Komodo & Beyond with Mermaid I
West Komodo & Sumbawa: Whale Shark Experience with Naga Biru
There are a lot of animals in the ocean that are thrilling to encounter. Octopus and other cephalopods like cuttlefish are mind-bendingly awesome as they change color, textures, and shapes right before your eyes. Turtles fill us with a sense of peace and tranquility as they calmly glide over the reefs. Then there are mantas, the fish with the largest brain-to-body ratio and one of the few ocean animals to make direct eye contact with people while seemingly trying to communicate by bobbing their heads and unfurling and furling their cephalic lobes. Of course, all of these animals are exquisite, and swimming with them will never stop being an experience we crave, however, there is nothing quite comparable to swimming alongside the largest shark in the ocean, sometimes up to eight individuals at a time, all of which are covered in a comical pattern of polka-dots and clearly have a one track mind, FOOOOOOOD!
