Look me in the eyes

Walking on water
Originally uploaded by mark&june

Hi from June in a wet and windy Kaikoura!

Its not all wall-to-wall sunshine out here as you might imagine from the photos we post, though to be honest it has been pretty beautiful weather in NZ - much better than we had expected.

Yesterday we woke early to a lovely calm sea and sunny day which was just about perfect for our Dolphin Encounter. I wasn't sure what to expect and was a bit worried that it might not be quite the right thing to do to try to swim with these wild animals.

Once we were kitted out in our wet suits we watched a briefing film explaining that they are wild and if they don't want to play with you they won't, definately don't touch them and basically if they find you interesting they'll play.

After about 25 minutes boat ride we came upon a big pod of dusky dolphins, they reckoned there were about 400 of them - what an amazing sight - they were swimming along with the boat, jumping out of the water, doing back flips and sommersaults and we just slipped off the back of the boat with our flippers and snorkles in amongst them.

They had recommended we try to make eye contact and make nosies to attract the dolphins' attention - I got the tune of the Chattanooga Choo Choo into my head and hummed that incessantly which seemed to do the trick and soon I had 4 or 5 dolphins swimming beside and around me making their little clicky noises. A couple of times I concentrated on just one and and we kept together for 30 seconds - a minute maybe, swimming round in circles diving down and back up but I quickly ran out of breath and stopped humming and they were off.

I couple of times I bumped into Mark and we just grinned inane snorkly grins at each other and set off to find our dolphin friends again.

I feel absolutely fine now about having swum with them. They aren't tempted to come to the boat in any way - they're not fed or enticed and they weren't performing for us, they were just doing what they do and seemed briefly interested in us - and the feeling of looking into their eyes and them looking back at you as you're swimming along is something I'll remember for a long time.