Day 8-Kaikoura!!!

    
Today was the day!  Dolphin swimming here I come!  I have to admit that I was nervous.  I feared that maybe I had set my expectations too high, that I wouldn't be able to swim, that I would get so excited that I would scare the dolphins away.  Bret likens it to meeting your idol.  You just get so star struck you don't know what to say.  Here's how the day went down...

We woke up early, and the sun was bright, thank goodness.  We rented some bikes and cycled down the Dolphin Encounter headquarters.  After checking in, we hung out for a while before we were called in to begin the adventure.  First we were outfitted in head-to-toe wetsuits, snorkel mask, and flippers.  We changed immediately and shuffled into a room to watch an informational safety video.  There were a lot more swimmers than I expected, nearly 40, and I was eager with anticipation.  We boarded a bus and took a short ride over to the other side of Kaikoura's peninsula to get on the boats.  Luckily we were on a boat with only 13 swimmers, while the other one was packed with the rest of the swimmers and additional spectators.  We were off!

We cruised down the coast, heading south, out to where the dolphins usually congregate.  On the boat ride there, we came across a few dolphins, two types of penguins, and fur seals in the water!  So cool!  Everyone was getting psyched to be seeing a couple of dolphins, but I was in absolute shock and awe and was starting to get butterflies in my stomach.  The gear was feeling heavy and tight, and my breathing was definitely speeding up.

Hello!
 
We arrived to a pod of over a hundred dolphins, even with a few babies!  The boat slowed to a stop, an air horn sounded, and the swimmers scurried to the back of the boat to slide quickly into the water.  It was such an adrenaline rush!  The first time we went in, they had warned us that the initial shock of the water temperature would knock us back a bit.  The cold water caught my breath, my snorkel filled with water, and I struggled to get my breathing under control.  Everything was quiet, I had lost Bret and the other swimmers, and I focused my gaze directly beneath me into the water, as instructed by my guide.  Instantly, dozens of dusky dolphins (only in the southern hemisphere) went zooming underneath me.  I was ecstatic!!!  We were told to make noises, singing through our snorkels, to communicate with the dolphins, swim in circles with our arms at our sides, and dive down, acting as dolphin-like as possible.  Before long, the fast dolphins had swam with their pod away from us, and we climbed back on the boat.  We repeated this process an additional 4 times.  The process was exhausting.  The buoyant suits made swimming difficult, and we were told to look down into the water the majority of the time.  But when we would look up, we could see dolphins somersaulting out of the water right in front of us!

Dusky dolphins
 
On my last swim, I managed to communicate with one of the little guys.  Making my noises, and catching the dolphin's eye, as I swam in a quick circle on the surface of the water looking down, the dolphin mimicked my movements directly underneath me.  It was a dream come true!  We were also instructed not to touch the dolphins, which I was happy to oblige to, but they swam so close, I don't know how they didn't run into me!  I was convinced that their tails were going to flip me in the face!

Other swimmers in the water
  
It was the coolest experience I have had in a long long time!  My description and pictures don't even do it justice, and I want to hold onto the moment forever!  I wish that I could have had some sort of goggle-cam so you could better understand how amazing this was for me!  Even Bret couldn't get over the initial shock of the experience.  As we got back onto the boat, exhausted and breathing heavy, we changed to warm clothes, enjoyed hot cocoa and cookies, and dolphin observed for a while.  That's where all of these pictures are from...we took video and underwater shots too, but I will need to do a bit of editing and sift through them after they're developed for a later post!

We were right in the middle of all of that!  There were twice as many underneath the water!