Coral Bay is a small holiday resort for people travelling with a campervan or car, wishing to avoid the more conventional tourist destinations. It is really nothing more than a couple of caravan parks, holiday homes for fishermen, and a few basic facilities to ensure that visitors do not have to make the 143 kilometres journey to Exmouth every time they want a loaf of bread or a cold beer.

Coral Bay's great appeal is its access to Ningaloo Reef, which is less than 100 metres from the shore and forms a kind of natural lagoon, which is ideal for people wishing to snorkel, scuba dive or explore the reef.

Lying just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, the waters are warm for most of the year and the beaches, like most of the beaches on the Western Australian coast, are white and hard and beautifully clean.

Exmouth was established in 1967 largely as a service centre for the huge US navy communications base. The US Navy left in the early 1990s and while part of the old naval base is still used by the Australian Navy (another part has become accommodation. The Navy Pier is one of Australia's great shore dives.

Visitors come to Exmouth to dive the beautiful Ningaloo Reef, lie on the white beaches, take safaris through the hauntingly beautiful Cape Range National Park and snorkel with the worlds largest fish, the Whale Shark, Rhiniodon Typus.

How To Get There

The nearest airport to Exmouth is called Learmonth, a former Australian airforce base just 35 kilometres south of Exmouth. A shuttle bus (about AU$ 20) meets each flight arriving and departing from the airport. Taxis are also available. Exmouth (Learmonth airport) is serviced with daily flights from Perth on Skywest.

There are 3 bus services per week from Perth to Broome, stopping in Coral Bay and Exmouth en route. Exmouth is about 1100 kilometres north of Perth. From Exmouth to Broome it is another 900 kilometres.

Coral Bay: You get there travelling with a campervan or car.

Climate

Exmouth and Coral Bay have an average winter temperature of 25°C (77°F), while the summer averages 35°C (96°F). Luckily, Exmouth has no wet season, so the summer days are low in humidity.

Diving

Ningaloo Reef is a fringing reef. It stretches along the coast, being separated from the coast by a shallow lagoon. Many people may be surprised, and do not expect such a rich coral reef so far south (latitude 21"53 south). The Leeuwin Current, a warm tropical current coming from the north, travelling south, is the driving force for coral to growth.

The best time to dive the Ningaloo Reef is during the winter months, which in WA are from March to the end of September. Whalesharks are usually seen along the reef between April and July.

The annual November coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef is already well known. Ningaloo Reef's spawn has now also been tracked. Here coral spawning happens during March, seven days after the March full moon.

Ningaloo Reef is home to beautiful coral bommies, mainly formed by pristine hard coral. There are soft corals also, mostly at Murion Island. There are fantastic swim-throughs, which literally fill up with thousands of transparent tiny cardinal fish. Those nice swim-throughs are very characteristic of Ningaloo Reef, appearing anywhere and everywhere.

The area is rich in fish life such as trevally, groupers and schools of parrotfish, striped surgeonfish and turtles. Grey reef sharks, white tip reef sharks and wobbegongs are often seen here. You get to see the smaller marine life as well. Nudibranch lovers will have a great time here. The whale sharks come to Ningaloo Reef a few weeks after the coral spawning. The chances to see them are very good from the beginning of April onwards, although you might be lucky in March. The best time for whale sharks is 1 April to July each year. Chances for spotting Manta Rays are also very good during those months.

The 300-metre long Navy Pier is already one of the most famous dive sites in Australia. Divers "who want to see it all", have this dive on their wish list as one of "the special dives to do in a life time".

Plan at least one dive for the Navy Pier. Because of the tidal currents it is only possible to dive on high or low tide. The dive operators offer the dives at the right time according to the tides.

The beams and pylons of the pier are encrusted in coral, and the life underneath this structure is unbelievable. Here is just a selection of what I saw in one 50 minute dive: 3 wobbegong sharks, a school of barracuda, 5 crocodile fish next to each other in the sand, some lion fish and stone fish, at least 6 nudibranchs and 3 or 4 flat worms, a couple of snappers, box fish, coral trout, gobies, trevally, angelfish and so on and so on. The Pier dive is a concentration of everything that tropical waters have to offer and you could well call it "The Pier Aquarium".

Dive Operators

• Diving infrastructure on the West Coast is not as well developed as on the Australian East Coast. The dive operators are best contacted locally when you are there. Pre-bookings through us are not possible at this stage. Some operators in Exmouth include Exmouth Dive Center, Coral Coast Dive and 3 Island Marine .

Hotels:

Book directly: Exmouth (AU)