Day 2 - DOLPHINS!!!!!

 Having resolved myself to having to sail back, I try to drift out of the main shipping channel, opened up a beer (wheat beer, the one that doesn't taste like beer), bungeed up the tiller, relaxed and admired the sky. Not much more I could do, I figured the ebb would shut me out for the night.

I was about to open a book. Both NKE and Doomsday device seemed to not be working, but given that I had 0.00 knots of boat speed, steerage didn't seem to be the most pressing issue.

And the magic happened.

Dolphins. 4 of them. They surrounded the boat from all sides.

They swam around the boat for a good two hours, under the keel, around the back, around the front, from all sorts of different directions.

I wonder if they were trying to tell me something. I just saw a ship in the distance and I was off the shipping channel so no risk of collision (and my radio was working :) so I could even have called straight to the ship or the traffic channel to indicate that I was basically adrift - there was still a lot of room for the ship. A non issue.

They came so close I could have touched them. I put my hand in the water and one of them swam right past it. I could feel the turbulence on my skin.

They something dove at the stern and reappeared at the bow, or started from one side and reappeared on the other, or just swam alongside the hull turned around and did the same thing int he other directions.

Bad photo, but the dolphin is right behind the solar panel mount.

Then two more came from behind and I had a group of 6 dolphins play around the boat.

I was all smiles!
What a fantastic experience!

Here are the last two swimming over to where the other ones were.

They stayed with me until I met the whale.