Dolphins of Destin

Another great day in Florida. We took an early morning walk on the beach, then enjoyed the sun while playing four close games of shuffleboard. Does this mean we are getting old? No, says Dick. He played it when he was just a kid on vacations!

Let's take a boat ride before the weather changes and it starts to rain on Thursday. The dolphin tour started with a snack for the gulls, thrown from the back of the boat. Talk about your feeding frenzy! I even noticed the white trailing edge on the wings, and white tail of mature Laughing Gulls, while the immature birds have more brown on their back and wings, and a dark bar on the edge of their tails. Oddly enough, we have seen no other gulls than the Laughing Gulls though.

The captain says they have about a 98% success rate in finding dolphins, and today was a stellar day! The Gulf was choppy, so we didn't go much beyond the stone jetty, but a pod of seven dolphins entertained us. We even saw one little dorsal fin belonging to a baby just born this year. Felt sorry for them though, with so many boats looking for them. The engine noises must have interfered with echolocation.

One guy didn't seem to mind the boats, and surfed in our bow wave. The faster we went, the faster he went!

Swimming dolphins look much better in videos than still photos, don't you think?

It starts getting dark around 4:30 in CST, so we stopped at a bayside bar for a beer and beautiful sunset. Then back to the room where I managed to reduce over 600 photos taken today to about 225.