Dive Review of Sail Ningaloo in
Australia/Ningaloo/Western Australia

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Sail Ningaloo: "Interesting diving in Western Australia", Mar, 2023, by Alice Ribbens, MN, US ( Sr. Contributor 20 reports with 23 Helpful votes). Report 12411 has 1 Helpful vote.
No photos available at this time
Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Accommodations		Food
Service and Attitude		Environmental Sensitivity
Dive Operation		Shore Diving	N/A
Snorkeling
Overall Rating
Value for $$
Beginners
Advanced
Comments	We had wanted to go to Ningaloo for awhile. After a trip planned by some friends was rescheduled due to Covid, we were able to join them. Our trip was also rescheduled due to Covid, but finally occured in March 2023. We spent ~3 weeks in Western Australia, a few days south of Perth and then making our way up the coast to Ningaloo, diving with Sail Ningaloo at the end of the trip. While the diving was very interesting, I don't know that I would do this trip again unless I happened to be in Australia or Western Australia for a different reason. (The diving in Ningaloo is very very different than the GBR.) Sail Ningaloo is a class operation. They were very responsive to all of our questions and inquiries ahead of time. They also arranged hotel rooms for all of us on the nights before and after the boat, arranged airport transport, and stored a bunch of extra luggage for us while we were on the boat. Their liveaboard Shore Thing is a catamaran and it's a small boat. Definitely the smallest of the 25 liveaboards I've been on (other than a teeny tiny boat in Lake Superior). There are 4 cabins for guests. 2 have king sized beds and ensuites. The other 2 as far as I know have double beds and smaller bathrooms. (My husband and I had the smaller of the 2 smaller rooms; our bathroom was outside our room.) I don't know about the bigger rooms, but there was very little storage space in our room and not much storage space elsewhere on the boat. No air con in our room, but we could open the window at night and there was a fan which provided a decent cross breeze. I gave accomodations 3 stars because of the size of our room, but if you had one of the larger rooms, you might feel differently. We had chartered the group as a group of 7 divers. I got the impression that it is unusual for them to have a whole dive trip/charter. It seems that they usually do snorkeling trips with maybe a few divers on board who do a handful of dives over the course of a 4-5 day trip. There is no nitrox on board, but that didn't really matter since most of the dives we did were fairly shallow. The captain did a good job at picking sites based on weather and surge conditions. It was generally windy during our trip and perhaps that also figured into what sites we dove. There were 2 DMs in the water with us on most dives. Even though we had chartered the whole boat (and were a group of very experienced divers), our dive times were limited to 50 minutes. Standard tanks were 10.5L steels, but the smaller tanks didn't really matter since they limited dive times and most of our dives were to 10 m or less. Most of the dives involved giant strides off the back of the boat. There isn't really a dedicated dive deck. The back part of the boat had some cubbies for storage of fins and smaller items as well as some camera buckets (2 people had large rigs and 2 had point and shoots and that seemed to challenge the capacity of available dedicated rinse buckets). But the back deck is also where they would set up a table for meals so everything was wiped dry after dives. (A couple of the crew also slept on this back deck on air mattresses.) My guess is that meals would have been in the salon in the event of bad weather, but that didn't happen. There also was no place to rinse wetsuits between dives. When we asked about that, we were told that usually they just rinsed stuff out at the end of a trip. We were told to hang wetsuits along with swimsuits over the railing (no hangers or place to hang wetsuits on hangers), but they needed to be tied down because of the wind. We had hoped to see whale sharks since March is the beginning of whale shark season in Ningaloo. BUT it turned out that where they usually see the whale sharks are specific snorkeling sites and you're not allowed to dive there (or something like that). We did snorkel with mantas but did not see any on our dives. The boat captain seemed surpised that we weren't more interested in snorkeling. Most of the coral we saw was not in great shape. That may have also been a function of the dive sites we were limited to because of the wind. We did see a lot of varied fish life, nudibranchs, etc. though the biodiversity was not as high as in Indonesia or other parts of the tropical pacific or Indian oceans. Water was generally chillier than we had hoped for--mostly 23-26 C. All of that being said, we did see lots of fish including a number of endemics. One dive site included a cleaning station for gray reef sharks--I've never seen so many outside of hook-in dives in Palau. We also saw 2 different kinds of wobbegongs on one of the night dives as well as a lot of other interesting critters. Limitations of the diving aside, the crew was fantastic. We received thorough briefings before all of the dives and the DMs were generally responsive to our dive styles. Aside from the DM and the capatin, there was 1 additional crew member who did all of the cooking and food prep (aside from when the captain manned the grill on the deck) and she was amazing. She dealt with everyone's food issues and every meal was incredible, especially when you consider the tiny kitchen in which it was prepared.
Websites	Sail Ningaloo
Reporter and Travel
Dive Experience	Over 1000 dives
Where else diving	Komodo, Raja Ampat, Banda Sea, Philippines, Maldives, Palau, GBR, Fiji, British Columbia, Monterey, Puget Sound, Hawaii, Bonaire, Turks & Caicos, Caymans, Honduras, Belize, Cozumel, Akumal, Sea of Cortez, Lake Superior, Solomon Islands, St. Croix, St. Vincent, Socorro, Cuba, Lembeh etc.
Closest Airport	Learmonth	Getting There	We flew to Perth and spent time driving up the coast. Flew back to Perth from Learmonth.
Dive Conditions
Weather	sunny, windy	Seas	choppy
Water Temp	23-26°C / 73-79°F	Wetsuit Thickness	5
Water Visibility	10-30 M / 33-98 Ft
Dive Policy
Dive own profile	no
Enforced diving restrictions	Dives limited to 50 (sometimes 60) minutes
Liveaboard?	no	Nitrox Available?	no
What I Saw
Sharks	Lots	Mantas	None
Dolphins	None	Whale Sharks	None
Turtles	> 2	Whales	None
Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):
Corals		Tropical Fish
Small Critters		Large Fish	N/A
Large Pelagics	N/A
Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Subject Matter		Boat Facilities
Overall rating for UWP's		Shore Facilities	N/A
UW Photo Comments	See above about rinse buckets. There were no dedicated charging areas. You could charge things in the salon or in your room.

Report currently has 1 Helpful vote

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Dive Review of Sail Ningaloo in Australia/Ningaloo/Western Australia

Sail Ningaloo: "Interesting diving in Western Australia", Mar, 2023,

Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Overall Rating

Reporter and Travel

Dive Conditions

Dive Policy

What I Saw

Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):

Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Dive Review of Sail Ningaloo in
Australia/Ningaloo/Western Australia