Three mornings in four across a season. Here is how we count it and why we publish it.
Every operator on this coast advertises the whale shark trip and almost none of them will tell you how often it works. We keep a note of it, so here it is.
Over the last full season our boats went out looking on two hundred and eleven mornings and saw at least one shark on a hundred and fifty nine of them. That is a little over three in four. On thirty of those mornings we saw more than one. The blank mornings cluster: a week of strong wind and poor visibility will produce four or five in a row, and then it comes good again.
We publish the number for a selfish reason as well as an honest one. A guest who was told there was a guarantee and saw nothing is angry with us for a promise we should not have made. A guest who was told three in four and saw nothing is disappointed with the sea, comes out again at half price, and usually sees one.
The things that improve your odds are all about timing rather than luck. Go early in your stay so there is room to go again. Go in the morning. And go on a day with some wind rather than a flat one, which sounds wrong and is not: the flat mornings look beautiful and the sharks sit deeper.
There are rules about how a boat approaches and how close a swimmer may get. We keep to them. If you are on a boat that does not, you are on the wrong boat.