After the long wait, you are back !!!

On the second day on the Big Island, we felt so blessed to be able to swim with the spinning dolphins at Ho'okena beach. We kept coming everyday in the same week but did not meet any dolphins. We wonder whether they are tired of human after the intense interaction on that day. Like our past experience of seeing aurora, that we were blessed on the first sight but the luck did not maintain, we worried that this first encounter would be the last.

Finally after a long wait, we met the dolphins on the same beach 10 days afterward. The morning started from a sunny calm sea surface. We had the gut feeling that the dolphins came, thus started off quickly and arrived the beach at 7:30am. A few fins appeared in the bay. Yeah... here we came.

After an evening of hunting, they were very active and curious of human being and swam around us. At that time including us there were ten people. We picked some big leaves as the dolphins' toy. Some snorkelers seem to be familiar with them and swam well, thus they could swim around with the dolphins. As less competent swimmers, we just floated and waited for them to swim to us.

They surely like us, as there were several occasions that they swam to us among other people. It seemed that they knew about Zach and were very curious of him the new life. As the group of spinning dolphins also have younger members, they were very active and also followed their mothers from time to time.

One of them even swam in front of my face while I was attending to a further away dolphin group. I could hear the "click-click" sound from that dolphin before bumping to me. It seems that he was making fun out of me with a surprise.

The game they played was to pass a piece of leaf among each other, or showed their skill by putting a leaf from the beak, then to front fin and back fin. They took some of the leaves I brought from the site.

They were in the bay in the whole morning. Different group of people went to the water to meet them. Sometimes I was concerned that their rest and sleep would be bothered. In fact they need to rest (from around 10am to 3pm) before they went out for hunting again. If their rest was disturbed, their hunting and self-defense would be affected. According to the local marine-life guideline. People should keep a distance from the dolphins (half-the-football) so not to disturb them. When one can see them underwater, it means it is too close.

So we got too closed to them. As less-competent swimmers we went back ashore more shortly than other snorkelers. We hope that would minimize our disturbance by not staying in water for too long. We were there the whole morning and they still did not leave after 1pm.

Their swim was so gracefully relaxed and they kept their observant senses on us, both with their ultra-side and also with the spiritual sight from their eyes on us. It did not make sense to us why such spiritual being were hunted in other part of the world. Their presence in the water was so real and assuring that their energy extend to us in the same water space. That made me feel humble to them.

With such fulfilling experience, we found that Zach was calmer in the womb. Zach, glad to know that you like the dolphins and it seems that they like you too. Hope both of you can meet each other more.