My wife shook me awake before first light. We had planned a day of snorkeling, and we wanted an early start. The ocean is always more revealing of its great beauty in the early hours.
As we walked down the beach, the sand was cool and damp and giving, and our footprints were the only ones to be seen. This early in the morning, the sea was a sheet of blue glass, and as we slipped into the water, our expectations were high, but for the first 40 minutes, we did not see anything out of the ordinary. Then I spied a plastic shopping bag on the bottom - probably blown into the water from one of the homeless encampments hidden along the shoreline - so I dove down, but it was deep, and when it felt like my eyeballs were about to pop out, I gave up, speeding back to the surface.
I beckoned for my wife, who is a beast in the water, and, with a few strong kicks, she was on the bottom, patiently extricating the bag from a clump of coral. She brought it to me, and I grabbed it and stuffed it into the waistline of my shorts. “Good karma,” I thought. “It's only one bag, but the ocean has no need of more plastic."
Then we continued on our way, the bag protruding a bit from my shorts and fluttering in the currents created by my movements. A few minutes later, I glanced up and saw a fin speeding my way. A twinge of fear evaporated as I recognized it for a "good fin." A fin with a dolphin beneath it. Then there were a dozen fins, all slashing across the surface and etching the face of the ocean with tiny wakes.
More arrived, and we were soon surrounded by more dolphins than I had ever seen in my life, and we were the only ones in the water. They remained with us for more than an hour, sometimes disappearing into the blue distance, then returning to join us, whistling and chattering and coming so near we could have reached out and touched them. They slipped with ease through the water, and the young ones, exuberant with all the joys of life, sped to the surface and burst into the air, where they briefly twisted and turned and danced in the sun before crashing back into the water.
After an hour, my wife said she was taking the same photos over and over, and there were now quite a few people alongside us, so we decided to say farewell to our new finned friends and continue on our way, which we did. Far down the beach, we were again by ourselves, skimming over schools of painted fish and banks of bright corals, the plastic bag still fluttering in my shorts, when a sudden swish of water and an onrush of shadows signaled the return of the dolphins. They had no fear of us and came so close that we could see every scratch on their bodies, as well as the perfectly round bites from cookie cutter sharks; and one even had a dorsal fin that had been neatly sliced halfway off, perhaps from the knife-like teeth of a shark or perhaps from a boat propeller. Female dolphins with babies paused next to us, as though the mothers were announcing to their youngsters, “Take a good look at this. Here are two humans who actually give a rat's ass about plastic in the ocean.”
Eventually, we tired and turned for shore, our weary arms propelling us slowly over the shimmering colors of the reef. At first, the dolphins seemed to follow us, but as we neared the sandy shallows, they suddenly turned, as if by a signal only they could discern, and disappeared into the blue. Two hours and 40 extraordinary minutes after our swim began, we finally hauled ourselves onto the beach, and I took the plastic bag from my shorts, breathed a silent thanks for a wonderful morning - a morning few people have experienced - and deposited the bag into the trash.
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