Our True Story of Swimming with Wild Dolphins: 5 Minute Freewrite P...

So we'd been hearing about other Cruisers seeing and even getting to swim with dolphins for months. My kids were dying for it to happen to us.

We were staying in the Georgetown Bahamas harbor at the time and the kids and Patrick, my husband, were trying to learn how to wind surf. The problem with learning to windsurf is that the wind generally only moves you in one direction if you're new to it and don't have quite the handle on actually steering the thing.

At any rate, Patrick was s=windsurfing for quite a while and we were taking turns going out on deck to make sure that he didn't float too far away. At one point I had to get the binoculars out to see him and he was just sitting on the board, sails down and obviously ready to be 'rescued' in the dinghy (think the car for our boat home).

I called to Abyni (who was 15 at the time), "Hey, Bean, your dad is ready to be rescued, can you come help?"

She came out from the salon and got in the dingy, asking for me to point which direction she needed to go. For once, probably in MONTHS, instead of wearing a swim suit, she was dressing in long pants and a shirt. She sat on the side of the dinghy, trying to get a lock on where her dad was when she saw the fins. She jumped up and freaked out, "SHARKS! Oh my god! MOM!!! LOOK!!!" She pointed to a spot a few yards from the back of our boat. I looked, but didn't see anything. My heart was racing, though. Sharks are a very real thing when you're on the ocean, and although they weren't generally aggressive to humans, it was still an ingrained freak out for me, knowing that my husband was out there on what is essentially a surf board!

Then suddenly, the fear turned immediately to excitement. Se hliterally screamed, "DOLPHINS!" And instantly flipped backwards off of the dingy, all of her clothes and everything. I looked again, and sure enough, there was a pod of three dolphins swimming right towards our boat.

Abyni popped up by the swim ladder and yelled, "FLIPPERS!!!"

I went to grab her flippers and yelled for Jaedin, "DOLPHINS! Jaedin! Grab the camera!" as Abyni climbed back up into the dinghy to get closer to the dolphins. Jaedin came racing out of his cabin, with the underwater camera in hand.

The excitement was infreakingTENSE. The kids both jumped in the dinghy and took off. Oddly enough, the dolphins appeared to be heading straight for Patrick on his board. The kids drove off and headed that way, careful to stay far out of the way of the dolphins. They were watching and squealing SO loud that I could hear them even when they were pretty far away.

I was in heaven. Although I have no desire to hop in the water and swim with them, I knew the kids would be making memories of a lifetime, even just getting to see them in the wild, up close.

They came back an HOUR later with about 45 minutes of video from swimming with the dolphins and were walking on air.

That was the first of at least 7 times of swimming with dolphins over the next few months. One day Jaedin even played hide and seek with one of them for a good long while and Abyni could attract one of them by singing and playing her guitar out on deck (The dolphin loved "Little Red Riding Hood, but didn't care for Meghan Trainor, btw). They also had the amazing experience of swimming with a dolphin family that had a little baby... it was magical each and every time!

See Some Video Here

Thanks to @mariannewest for the #freewrite challenge!
Prompt: swimming with the dolphins
Set your timer for 5 minutes
Start writing
Use the hashtag #freewrite
Publish your piece

Other posts of mine that you may be interested in:

My Real Life Stories:

My #introduceyourself post