The night after this sail a school of dolphins swam with us for hours! I'll let Kai narrate the experience:
It's a bit past four in the morning and I've just come off one of the most incredible watches I've ever had. We tried to go into a cove for the night just at sunset to find it was a bit to dicey to linger in overnight. Wall to wall fishing boats with a wicked surge around a rocky hole in the wall 'harbor'. Our next destination is only about 20 miles down the coast so we went straight off shore, did a 180 degree turn at the half way point and are headed back towards shore.
As we left the coastline, in the quickly fading light there was quite a lot of bio-lumeneces around the boat. Sparkles in our wake and pulses of green light all around the dark ocean near us. Earlier I had seen a pod of porpoises playing near the boat and riding our bow wave for a while. They came back in the dark water as glowing trails in the inky black water, twisting and turning, jousting, jumping and parrying all around us, seeming to delight in the light they were stirring up and sculpting with their fluid movements.
I watched their antics for a while, checked the boat's systems and then watched them some more. At one point they zoomed ahead and I lost them in the dark. I stood there for a few minutes, my body half way out of the hatch just marveling at all of the the stars on this moonless night.
All of a sudden a motion of light off to the right of the bow caught my attention. A straight line of light was streaking through the sea directly at the boat! Like a neon green torpedo it came on straight and fast. At the last second it darted left and went past the boat with three blobs of light trailing it and arcing off in different directions.
I could almost hear the porpoises giggling in the water around me. They had herded a marlin or sail fish towards the boat for sport. They didn't seem intent at eating or hurting it in any way. They just seemed to do it for fun and either my or their own amusement.
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