Tuesday / Wednesday - day 3 and 4

Blog for Tuesday / Wednesday – May 26 / 27

Today I’ll cover two days to speed things along.
Tuesday we took it easy. Drove back to Naples to visit a book-store and replenish reading material. It had been a while since we were in a book-store – I’ve been using the library as my primary source (cheaper that way). We walked out with more than we planned and headed back to Marco.

On the way back we stopped and made reservations for a boating adventure on Wednesday – a 3-hour trip in the bay, among the mangrove islands, and a stop on the barrier island for sand / shells / and a chance for Margaret to wade in the Gulf. All of today’s photos are from this boating trip.

The boat had 22 folks aboard plus the captain and a naturalist / photographer. The naturalist was a great source of information about the dolphin habits (we saw a lot of them) and the birds spotted along the way. The naturalist works for an organization keeping track of dolphins. The dolphins are identified by the markings and shapes of their dorsal fin. We were shown a book of photographs of the dolphins they’ve seen and named! There were over 130 photos of different dolphins in the book. We were supposed to watch to see if we could find any new, un-named dolphins. Usually they were some distance away, but by the end of trip some dolphins were playing next to the boat. The most fun was when they were “chasing” the boat and body surfing in the boat’s wake.

I had the “wrong” camera for dolphin photography. By the time I saw it and pushed the button, he (she?) had already jumped / whatever and was back in the water. It was only towards the end of the trip that we found some in shallow water. These were on the surface more than they were under water. We also saw a couple rolling and playing – foreplay?

I’ve included a couple of shots of birds around the mangrove islands plus the beach where Margaret waded in.

A great outing.