Whale Sharks in La Paz: The Season Is a Count, Not a Date

A guest wrote to me last week from somewhere much colder, planning a February stay, and at the bottom of a long list of house questions was this one: can we do the whale sharks while we’re there?

In February, almost certainly yes. It’s the October and early-November version of that question that goes wrong, and it goes wrong the same way every year. So while it’s too hot here in August to do much except answer messages, here is the honest version of how whale shark season in La Paz actually works — which is not how it reads on the tour pages.

One thing first, because I’d rather be straight about it: this is not something that happens in La Ventana. The sharks gather up in the Bahía de La Paz, about an hour northwest of us, and every trip goes from there. It’s the one day trip I’ll actively talk a winter guest into leaving the bay for.

The season is a count, not a date

Every site you’ll read says the season runs October 1 to April 30. That’s true, and it’s also the most misleading fact about the whole thing.

October 1 is when the regulatory window opens — the earliest date boats could be permitted to go out. It is not the date the animals arrive. What actually opens the season is a count. Monitors have to document a minimum number of whale sharks inside the protected area on several consecutive days before anyone is allowed in the water, and a higher number again before it runs at full capacity. If the count drops back below the threshold partway through the season, swimming stops until it recovers.

So the calendar sets the outer edges and the animals decide the rest. Last season the gap between the two was not small: the window opened on paper on October 1 and the boats didn’t go in until the second week of November, at reduced capacity, only reaching full capacity in December.

If your trip lands in October or early November, do not build it around the whale sharks. Treat it as a thing that might happen, and be delighted if it does.

That is genuinely the most useful sentence in this post. I’ve watched people book a Baja California Sur trip specifically for this, in the first fortnight of the window, and find the season simply hadn’t started. Nobody lied to them. They just read a date as a promise.

What the refuge actually is

The reason there are thresholds at all is that this isn’t open sea — it’s a designated refuge. The protected area covers something close to 23,000 hectares of the Bahía de La Paz, running from the coast at San Juan de la Costa down to the entrance of the ensenada, between the point at El Mogote and the La Paz malecón.

The sharks come into that stretch to feed, in shallow, plankton-rich water, which is exactly why it’s possible to snorkel with the largest fish in the sea without any of the drama you’d imagine. They’re filter feeders. They are not remotely interested in you. The whole encounter is you trying to keep up with something enormous that is concentrating on lunch.

It also means the whole thing is managed rather than wild. There’s a cap on how many boats can be inside the refuge on a given day, and the day is split into time slots so they aren’t all there at once. That cap is why the good operators are booked out well ahead in the busy months, and why turning up in La Paz on the morning hoping to find a boat is a poor plan in February.

The rules, and why a good operator recites them at you

These are worth knowing before you book, because the fastest way to sort a serious operator from a careless one is to see how quickly they tell you about them. The ones running this properly will brief you before you’ve paid. The ones who don’t mention any of it are the ones to walk away from.

• Five swimmers and one certified guide per shark, thirty minutes maximum. Not five per boat plus whoever else is around — five in the water at a time with that animal. Your group takes turns.
• You can’t be in the water without an authorised guide. That’s not the operator being precious. It’s the rule.
• You keep your distance. A set gap off the body, and a bigger one off the tail — about four metres — because the tail is the part that can actually hurt you.
• No touching, no riding, no chasing. Ever, for any reason, including the one where it swam toward you.
• No diving down. Freediving and duck-diving under the shark aren’t permitted — you stay on the surface, in a wetsuit, and swim alongside.
• No flash photography, no drones, and no kayaks, jet skis or paddle craft in the refuge. The photo you were hoping for is a surface photo.

None of this makes it worse. If anything it makes it better, because the animal isn’t being harassed by fifteen people at once and it therefore sticks around and behaves normally.

Doing it as a day trip from here

From La Ventana or El Sargento it’s a half-day, realistically: about an hour’s drive each way, plus the trip itself and the wait at the dock. Boats generally go in the morning, which is also when the sea in the bay is flattest.

Here’s the tension nobody warns winter guests about. Your good days here are windy, and windy is exactly what you don’t want for this. Chop makes spotting harder, it makes the crossing unpleasant, and it makes thirty minutes of surface swimming considerably more work. So don’t spend a beautiful El Norte day driving to La Paz. Spend one of the flat, still, slightly disappointing days on it — the ones that come along every season and that people otherwise waste refreshing the forecast. That’s the trip.

Two practical notes. Book ahead in the busy months rather than on the morning, for the boat-cap reason above. And bring less than you think: a towel, warm dry clothes for the ride back, and reef-safe sunscreen, because you’ll be face-down on the surface for half an hour with your back to the sun.

What it’s actually like, honestly

It is thirty minutes, and they go extremely fast. The water in the refuge is often greenish rather than the postcard blue — the plankton is the reason the sharks are there in the first place, so cloudy water is a good sign, not a bad one. Winter water is cool enough that the wetsuit isn’t a formality. And you will spend most of your allotted time swimming hard, because a whale shark ambling along at feeding pace is faster than you are.

What people don’t expect is how calm it is. There’s no adrenaline to it. Something the size of a small bus goes past a couple of metres away, entirely uninterested, and the overwhelming feeling is not fear — it’s that you have been allowed to look at something that has nothing to do with you. Most people come back quieter than they left.

The bottom line

Whale sharks are the best day trip out of this bay, and the season is more fragile and more governed than the tour listings suggest. Read October 1 as an opening of paperwork, not an arrival. Assume the middle of the winter — December through March — if you need it to be certain. Book with someone who tells you the rules before you pay. And go on a flat day, not a windy one.

Everything closer to home — the lessons, the boats, the trips that leave from this side of the bay — sits under Experiences, and the rest of what there is to do around town is in the town guide.

If you’re planning a winter here and you want to know whether your dates line up with any of this, message me. It’s August, the town is asleep, and I have nothing but time to answer.

— Diana