Dolphins

Day 17- February 22nd

My dad, sister, and I got in the car at five the next morning and drove to the Dolphin Encounters office. We watched a safety video, and then were loaded in a bus to the dock. Almost everyone else was going to be swimming with the dolphins, so they were wearing wetsuits and snorkels. Last time I was here, in 1998, my mom had gone swimming while my dad and I stayed on the boat. She remembers that, although she got to see dolphins up close, it was hard to swim in the open ocean. It was also a lot more expensive to swim, so she had decided not to pay for us to go. Since we couldn’t change our minds after we were on the boat, she thought we should see what it was like and if we really wanted to swim, we could come back as adults (and pay for it ourselves, of course).

A beautiful sunrise

So we got to sit on the boat and watch everyone else swim. The boat traveled out for 15 minutes, looking for dolphins in various sites. The ocean waves were huge, so the ride was bumpy and fun. When we found the dolphins, the swimmers all got in the water and my family, and one or two other people, stayed onboard. The amount of dolphins was amazing, and it looked like the swimmers were seeing a lot. But it was also very choppy, and I think that it would have been hard work if I had been swimming.

We picked up the swimmers again and went to another spot, and I got lots of pictures. We picked the swimmers up again, and then went on a “photo tour”. They let people up to the front of the boat, were dolphins were surfing right under the bow on a pressure wave created by the boat.

After the tour was over, we packed our car and drove across the island to Marahau. On the way we heard on the radio about the Christchurch earthquake. It was amazing to hear about, since we had been there just two days before the earthquake. We stopped in Nelson and got a bottle of denatured alcohol for our alcohol stove.

In Marahau, we stayed at a campground (or holiday park, as they call them here.) It has camping spot, as well as some cabins, pre-setup tents, and a backpacker’s hostel. The last time we were here, we stayed in an old camper, and the time before that in a tipi. They didn’t have these anymore, so we just camped.

Tomorrow we would be leaving on our five day, four night backpacking trip through Abel Tasman National Park, so we had a lot of packing to do.