Swimming with Dolphins (the hard way)
My sister and I should never get into a kayak together
The cresting wave looks like a tsunami from my vantage point directly under it in a pitifully small, plastic kayak. “Turn!” I yell from the stern. My sister, Sal, is in the bow. If we don’t turn the kayak’s nose into this wave, we’ll be underwater, again.
“Which way?!” she calls above the din of the rising power.
“The other way!” I yell, not so helpfully. The swell that precedes a monster wave is lifting us higher. I paddle frantically but I can’t seem to do anything right. The kayak begins to tilt.
I’d like to say that in these situations you have a few moments before you go overboard, to mentally prepare to be dunked, but it is not the case. One second we are paddling furiously — each the opposite side of where we should be paddling — and the next second we’re underwater with that “WTF” thought bubble rising to the surface.
This was yet another one of those instances. Underwater, again. With the sharks.
I’d like to say that in these situations you have a few moments before you go overboard
We were in Australia, somewhere up the coast from Noosa Heads in a quest to see dolphins. We’d spent the morning getting there, meeting our guide in a parking lot in Noosa for a drive to a ferry across a wide, muddy river to Teewah beach, and then onto the Great Beach Drive, following the tracks of other 4WDs on an empty, endless stretch of sand.
We probably should have called it a day right then. Anything called “Epic Adventures” should have told me that four people ranging in age from 56 to 70 might be over their heads.
Sal and I had partnered up at the start of the paddle with a smug sense of superiority given our family’s strong water history — we’re a family of competitive swimmers. Not necessarily on a team, just against each other. Like seals, we look better in the water.
We’ll rock at this, we were both secretly thinking, while Rex, my husband, and my cousin Eileen teamed up in a second kayak. My hubris would come to bite me in the ass about three minutes later, our first dunking. We hadn’t even left the shallows yet.
Our first job was to get ourselves over the crashing waves and into the calmer water behind the surf. With the merest of instructions yelled into the wind by the twenty-something leaders, the group of kayakers broke up and took to the waves. Sally and I promptly tipped over.
Wet, frustrated, I looked at Sally, her hair dripping in her eyes as she sputtered and spit out salt water.
The shock of being wet in a surprisingly chilly sea embarrassed us enough to want to redeem ourselves immediately. Such was our optimism that early into the ride. Sally hopped up and climbed in while I held the boat. Then I tried. This is the seal-on-land part. Just as I was about to swing my leg in, over we’d go, shouting in a pang of disbelief. After three more dunks, we were not yet any closer to the wave. And our group was now safely on the other side of the surf, turned toward us in a neat arc, patiently waiting.
Underwater once again, it occurs to me that I may be the common element in this story.
Wet, frustrated, I looked at Sally, her hair dripping in her eyes as she sputtered and spit out salt water, and thought, why are we doing this? I hate to kayak. Or canoe. So peeved was I on one particular canoe trip that I’d come this close to hitting Rex over the head with a paddle. In my defense he’d just parted the low-hanging tree limbs for himself and let them snap me in the face. My brother glided up, expertly, to our side and separated the two of us. His wife joined me in my canoe. And we promptly dunked into that ice-cold, rushing spring river.
I had thought at the time that Rex, and then my sister-in-law, were pathetic outdoors-people and should never again be allowed into boats. But now, underwater and once again shocked at the cold of it, it occurs to me that I may be the common element in this story.
“Should we just quit?” Sally yells over the roar of the surf, with the eyes of a child on the first day of kindergarten — please, take me home to Captain Kangaroo.
“Fine by me,” I say, thinking of the warm sand and the sun. I can sunbathe and probably see the same damn dolphins from the beach. But just then, our exuberant camp director paddles up and tells us with that summer-camp coach enthusiasm, “No way are you quitting. You’ll get the hang of it, I promise!”
Sally and I are both scarred by a certain overly cheerful Sunday School teacher who each and every Sunday admonished Sally to “smile, it’s such a beautiful day,” and to me, “why the grumpy Gus? God loves you!” To which Sally would simply scowl, and I would turn and walk home. We are both programmed to hate people in direct proportion to their optimism. Sally tried not to scowl at our camp leader.
“Ok, come on,” I say, channeling my adventure race spirit. I’d done exactly one adventure race, with two guy friends. There, too, was a dreadful canoe race in the pouring rain, I seem to recall.
We have now managed to stay afloat for all of ten minutes. Hallelujah.
We muster the can-do spirit and after both of us successfully launch ourselves into the kayak, we’re off and through the waves. Rex and Eileen are among the pod of kayakers waiting patiently for us. We have now managed to stay afloat for all of ten minutes. Hallelujah.
Our team of kayakers are all quite serious athletes, we quickly learn. In one moment of rest, we overhear the chit chat about paddling 25 miles a day on vacation last year. Not much of a vacation if you ask me, I mutter to myself. We had gone maybe a mile at this point.
The whole point of this adventure was to check off Sal’s bucket list goal of swimming with dolphins.
It had been a magical trip, the two of us in a car on a two-lane highway, our natural habitat then, seeing otherworldly sights.
The four of us had spent the last ten days driving through Australia, first northwest from Sydney into the mountains, and then back to the coast. Years ago, in 1994 when Rex and I were living on Guam we spent three weeks driving the blue highways of Australia. We’d stated north, in Daintree, and made our way to Sydney via a trip into the Outback — like driving from Maine to Miami with a detour to Cincinnati. It had been a magical trip, the two of us in a car on a two-lane highway, our natural habitat then, seeing otherworldly sights — rainbow cockatoos bursting from a tree in a flash of color, a kangaroo bounding over the hood of our car in the early morning as I fumbled for a camera, night hikes in Daintree rain forest searching for the Doctor Seussian cassowary, and the utter isolation of the Outback.
The road trip was one of the most memorable in our life. It had happened at a point when we’d been at the top of our game of travel-transformation. We’d uprooted and moved to Guam, which had dislodged us from our friends and city. It had made us adapt and learn new ways of living, and we discovered just how easy it was to change a life. A year into the transformation, we’d booked the flight to Australia in the same spirit of adventure. Nothing could go wrong. And nothing did. Even when we called the Daintree Eco Lodge from a pay phone in New Zealand with a phone card — punching in the 23 numbers of the phone card sequence and then the number of the lodge from a roadside phonebooth, rushing through the booking while watching the three paid-for minutes tick down. Halfway through the booking the money ran out, and we just had to assume the room would be ready for us. And it was. Invincible.
This current road trip, twenty-five years later, also had its moments.
Kangaroos gathering in a field at dusk. White cockatiels with rosy pink breasts making their way slowly across a lawn like a very slow lawn mower, eating their dinner of grubs. You don’t see that in the Midwest. A koala bear hospital. Aww.
A deserted site with Aboriginal rock art, the four of us alone in the woods bearing witness to their long-ago urge to proclaim “we are here.”
A slow climb up a mountain to Treetop National Park, the last several miles on gravel with cow bars and gates to open and close behind us, dusty gum trees on all sides.
Behind the final gate, a primordial forest of tree-high ferns and masses of yellow wattle bush like sun splashes.
And so very, very quiet. Birds only.
Down from the heights to the beach, Avoca Beach and the Sunshine Coast. Aptly named. Beaches of sand so fine it squeaks underfoot, dotted with mysterious miniature piles of perfectly round sand pellets, like UFO crop circles — the futile, Sisyphean makings of a sand bubbler crab.
But not all is idyllic. Over lunch, Eileen reads the local paper — a shark attacked two surfers two days ago.
And that is what I’m thinking as I am once again underwater.
The adrenaline shoots me out of the water like a water cannon and onto the back of the kayak. I’m getting good at this part, at least. We have been on the water for thirty minutes, but it seems like an eternity. Rex and Eileen aren’t doing much better by the looks of things. Rex is paddling in a nearly supine position, his back killing him. And they are heading into the surf toward the beach when everyone else is paddling the opposite way.
Suddenly, a cheer goes up. “Dolphins!”
Sally and I turn to see what everyone is yelling about and, of course, flip over. This time, we both simply cling to the kayak and watch as a pod of dolphins leap and dance on the cresting waves.
“Hey Sally,” I yell. “We’re swimming with dolphins!”
Things I have learned? My sister has a very creative facility with language when she’s pissed off. The dolphins gone, she begins swimming toward land. I follow with the kayak until I can stand. And promptly fall down. Our legs are like a Gumby doll. We’re cold. We’ve swallowed a gallon of salt water. They can come and find us.
By the time they do find us, we’re laughing once again, walking toward the Jeep and the rest of our “team.” Though I have no idea where the kayak is.
This story is published in Writers on the Run. If you’re interested in submitting your travel stories please visit our submission guidelines.
