Dolphins

Rockingham was the base of a company that takes you with a boat to swim with dolphins. "Swimming" is not accurate here because you are not allowed to move but we are getting ahead of ourselves. We looked into it while leaving in Perth but in order to take part in it we had to meet with them at 7 in the morning or something so we had to be awake at 6 or earlier which was not going to happen. So we went there while we were living in Rockingham. By that time we also had come coupons which let us save some good money, so everything worked out well ... except Diana freezing to death, so now I have to find a new woman. Applications are accepted via e-mail.

You will know what you see in a minute. Read on!

We picked the warmest day of the week actually and we were outfitted with diving suits but that didn't help much. The way it worked is that we visited wild dolphins and when we saw them, the boat would stop, we would drop in the water and the dolphins might come and stay with us for a bit or not. They were not fed or anything. We also couldn't swim because the movements we normally do while swimming and producing bubbles and such are interpreted by the dolphins as aggressive behaviour. So we made lines like on the photo with one person hanging on the belt of the previous one and the guy or the gal at the top being one of the guiding team pulling us with a machine thingy that I don't have word for. Depending on the place in the row and the clarity of the water, we sometimes saw the dolphins very clearly and sometimes not at all. It's good fun. The "problem" is, I wanted more of it.

This one can probably jump higher than me on land.

The boat also made some waves which the dolphins used to surf and jump out of which sounds still insane as I am writing it. This amount of playfulness you normally link to cats and dogs which are at least domesticated. After doing our rounds, they gave us a meal and some additionaly explanations of what we saw. Turns out that the playfulness of dolphins extends to them trolling other fish. We saw a stingray next to a dolphin and what dolphins do with stingrays is that they can anticipate when they are going to find food with their sonar, so when the stingray is doing its rounds and forces its prey to come out of the sand, the dolphin will come in, flip the stingray and steal the food. One dolphin also sucked the poison out of a blowfish because the poison is like drugs to them and they like getting high. They seem to get away with it.

Am I too nice to people?