After a glorious and rigorous morning session in the waves, (every day seemed to improve the wave set), we all took a very long nap.
Our big adventure for today was our evening dolphin tour. We got to see a bit more of the island and its fantastic bike paths, as we drove out to Broad Creek Marina. After about long walk on the pier crossing over the marsh area, we met our skipper, paid our fare ($16 per adult, $8 for the two girls), and then boarded our boat.
While waiting for others to arrive for our 5 pm tour, we were treated to two very close encounters with dolphins, including two that came up right past the boat.
When we finally got under way, we actually spend the first ten minutes pretty much chasing the dolphins that were at the dock trying to get closer, so it almost seemed like it would have been cheaper just to stay at the dock and look for dolphins.
Eventually we headed up Broad Creek and out to Calibogue Bay, but didn't see any dolphins on the way out. Our skipper, lacking much wildlife to report on, regaled us with tales of real estate prices of the homes we were passing.
Turns out that there was some real deals available, including a house appraised at $17 million going for $6.5 million because of foreclosure. We will be checking with our realtor and banker to see if we might be able to swing this.
Once out in the bay, we eventually turned around and headed back in. At this point, the captain of the ship had had enough piloting for awhile and decided to let ME pilot the ship. She drove it mostly straight and steady, eventhough here legs were shaking a bit from the responsibility. Eventually, she gave command back to the skipper.
On our way back, we finally started to see some more dolphins, including one that was trailing right behind a speed boat, swimming with its head out of the water and looking for a handout. Apparently this particular dolphin is quite famous for this behavior.
We also saw a small family of dolphins feeding together.
At one point in our cruise, our boat was in danger of being overrun by a pirate sailing ship, but fortunately, the little band of pirates on our boat was able to scare them off.
We saw another dolphin, just as we were heading back to the dock, probably one of the ones we had seen while we had originally been docked.
We bid our captain adieu, ate a quick bite at Subway and then were going to head out to one of the northeastern beaches at Hilton Head plantation. But we found the gates guarding the way against peasants like us, so we turned back to our own beach.
This pm session of waves was excellent. I discovered that the skim board we got for JPD to try to learn skim boarding (which so far he hasn't got the hang of) makes an excellent boogie board, far better than the standard boogie board we had. There were some fantastic large waves and the skim board served up excellent runs time and time again.
After night fell and our weary bodies gave out, we sat on the beach and watched the stars come out, as well as some illicit fireworks that somebody was shooting off further down the beach. A nice pleasant night on the people's beach.
