After more than a year in Seychelles Kerstin Gillray, a Divemaster Intern at Underwater Centre / Dive Seychelles, has finally seen her first whale shark!
All through the 2008 whale shark season Kerstin was on tender-hooks with each dive, hoping to see one of these big spotty fish, but she consistently managed to avoid them... even on the monitoring programme it seemed that where Kerstin was the sharks were not!
But all this came to an end on Friday the 15th of May... Kerstin and instructor Theirry Vandamme had just finished a great dive at Brissare Rocks and Dragons Teeth having seen a school of 35 eagle rays, white tip sharks, groupers and more fusiliers than she could think about counting.
Everyone was back on the boat chatting enthusiastically about the dive when the boat captain Nigel sighted the whale shark. All discussion stopped and Kerstin barely had time to repeat the whale shark code of conduct before an excited group of divers had donned masks, snorkels and fins and were back in the water for a very special treat!
Even though it was her first ever whale shark, Kerstin did a good job of getting both left and right side photographs for the MCSS photo ID programme and less than two hours later they confirmed that this was a 'new' shark and in fact is the 1240th identified whale shark in the regional database!But Kerstin didn't care... it was Number One for her!!!
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