Musings from Zanzibar
Personal Journal and Photographs, Day 4
Monday, 27/08/2018
I slept like crap. I’ve never liked going to bed early and it was only a matter of time before my body decided to rebel and keep me wide awake during a large portion of the night. 9:30 is too early for a night owl like me to pack it in. As such, by a touch after midnight, I woke, took a sip of water from the bottle by the bed, read some, then spent the next few hours in reflective stillness, trying to ignore the lingering sting in places from too much sun exposure.
Around 3:00, I finally dozed off again, only to rise again — this time by preordained alarm — at 5:30 to prepare for my date with the dolphins. Since I’d soon be leaping into the ocean at the crack of dawn, a shower seemed unnecessary; I brushed my teeth, though, in case the dolphins wanted to pose for a picture.
At 6:02, we arrived at the ladder leading down to the ocean where Captain Haji was waiting for us in his boat. They all call themselves captain here; at least anyone who operates a boat. We hopped in the boat with our snorkeling gear, which would soon prove to be utterly ineffective. Perhaps I’m a bad snorkeler, if such a thing exists.
I lashed some flippers to my feet and then we were zipping across the moonlit water in the minutes before rising dawn. At first, there was just one other boat among us. Around 5 or 6 others joined us in short order. As my phone is decidedly not waterproof, I left in the care of the captain and prepared to catch sight of a dolphin. He ran the boat out far to the left of our lodge near a jutting edge of the coast, then turned about abruptly, saying another captain had spotted them.
It took a minute or so of casting our eyes about wildly to catch that familiar glimpse of dolphin fins cutting through the surface of the water. Not just one but at least a small school of four or five swimming in perfect sync with one another. They weren’t very large; then again, I don’t have any prior experience with dolphins to go by. The captain said they were black dolphins — at least, that’s what I think he said. It was hard to tell with the running motor and the sloshing of waves.
“Get ready!” he exclaimed and I jumped in without the mask and snorkel properly secured to my face and I started swallowing shot after shot of salt water. Dolphins are speedy, however, and had already moved on to another feeding spot before I could catch a better view. The captain then told us to climb aboard so we could track them to a new spot.
Of course, climbing aboard a rocking boat using a two rung rusted iron ladder draped over the side while wearing flippers is not as easy as it sounds. Eventually, I developed a technique of bracing my knee against the bottom rung so I could plant a flippered foot and pull myself up and over. The process repeated a few times until I decided to abandon the snorkel — fortuitously, as it turns out — and just hold my breath during the time I’d be underwater.
I leapt in just a meter or two from a few dolphins, catching a perfect view of their well-known features. Below me, I saw another three barrel-rolling in their search for food and then one appeared directly below me as if in slow motion. I kicked hard and swam down in an attempt to cover the distance between us. I very nearly touched her; I couldn’t have been more than six or seven inches away when I suppose the dolphin got bored or impatient with me and sped away.
I did get a good look into her eyes and saw some markings that could have been scar tissue, but what the hell do I know?
I saw another guy swimming around with a GoPro and I let my imagination wander what sort of footage I might have achieved with this gadget. No doubt it would have required heroic editing skills to omit ladder climbing fails and salt water gurgles and stitch together various dolphin sightings to make the effort seem effortless. I jumped in about ten times in total but none matched that special moment of near contact.
The captain dropped us off at the lodge and we returned to the bungalow to rest until partaking in breakfast a bit after 9:00. Then, D. went to nap in the sun while I stayed in the room, read for an hour, slept for an hour, worked out, slathered myself with suntan lotion, and then came poolside to sit here and write in the shade.
The skies here are a light shade of blue. At the moment, there’s just one cloud to my left that looked at first like an overweight unicorn before elongating to a dragon, then a lizard, before dissolving entirely into wisps.
