Dolphins!

A few years ago I recall seeing dolphins in the ocean near the beach, but I got extra lucky one morning on this stay. I set off on my morning constitutional along the beach at around 5.4am and the sea looked particularly pretty with the sun glinting off the really quite bright blue sea. I set off northwards along the beach. I often concentrate on the waves and sand but this time I cast my eyes further afield and was rewarded with the sight of dolphins!

They were a few hundred metres away but easily recognisable and were gently heading south. I decided to walk along parallel to them and turned around. Miraculously my camera that had not worked a few minutes earlier came alive and I was able to TRY and take some shots. As my camera is just a point and shoot though, I took 70 odd photos in the direction of these lovely creatures before they became too far away to keep attempting shots. A few shots have the odd fin visible but an extraordinarily high number were of the sky. LOL. This group had 4 dolphins, one of which was a youngster going by its size. A further two dolphins could be seen even further out.

I decided to turn around and got about halfway back to where I started when I looked to the waves and saw two dolphins no more than 10 metres from me in the first breaker. As it was a relatively high tide, the dolphins were in pretty shallow water and a few times I saw them squiggle pretty hard keeping going rather than getting grounded! I turned south again and followed these two for quite a while before they speared off eastwards and into deeper water.

These two provided such delight - there really is something mesmerising and uplifting by these wonderful beasts. For the most part they just glided, surfacing occasionally and sometimes blowing water out of their blowhole, so I mostly saw just their fin, however they were that close you could see the jagged edge of the back of their fins and their smooth grey skin . One in particular turned towards me through the wave and then turned south again, getting lifted up by the wave and highlighted by the sun through the water (see below). The two even raced around each other when they must have found some tasty little fish.



By the time I left the beach an hour and a half later there were quite a few people on the beach and I could see another couple of dolphins a few hundred metres north, doing their job of mesmerising more people.