Page 65 of Big Island Sunrise
“The best!” She took the fins and hugged them to her chest.
Tenn’s grin was more dazzling than the sparkling water. But this time, she didn’t look away. He was the one to break eye contact, still grinning as he looked down at his own mask and fixed the snorkel that was trying to escape its bindings.
With fins on their feet, the swim out to the mouth of the bay was easy enough. The sea floor dropped away drastically, dark and deep, and they swam on.
They paused when they neared the pod, giving the animals plenty of space. Lani kicked her feet soft and slow, just enough to stay at the surface. She breathed through the snorkel and watched dolphins swimming far below, swift and graceful and blue with distance.
Then the dolphins came to them.
Playful and curious, the nearest dolphins swam directly under them. Another pair, a mother and calf, swam past deep beneath the water. Another swam towards them at full speed and jumped, spinning overhead to land on the other side with a dramatic splash.
Lani dove beneath the surface of the water and kicked hard, racing dolphins who could swim ten times faster than she ever would. They swam over and under her, playful as children.
Joy filled her chest, so unfamiliar in its ferocity that she thought she might cry. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt such childlike wonder, completely immersed in this moment in time.
Nearly all of them were bigger than Lani, and the largest ones must have been seven feet long. The longer they stayed there, the closer the dolphins came. Some swam past so close by that she could have reached out and touched them.
A flash of color caught her eye, a trailing length of red, and for a moment she thought that one of the dolphins was terribly injured. But when she turned and looked more closely, she realized that the dolphin was trailing something on its fin. It looked like a long red scarf.
As she watched, the scarf slipped off of its fin and hung suspended in the water for a moment before another dolphin caught it on its pectoral flipper. It made her think of a little girl running with a length of ribbon.
They watched for a long time as the dolphins played catch with the red scarf, passing it back and forth. Eventually, one of them returned it to the woman with long silver hair.
They stayed out with the dolphins for hours, until her legs ached and her stomach rumbled, and then they swam back to shore. She crawled onto the semi-solid ground and turned over in the sand, prying the fins off of her feet so that she could stand and walk.
Tenn sat beside her, already holding his fins in one hand.
“Short of holding my newborn baby and looking up at the Northern Lights,” she said, still panting from the effort of swimming back to shore, “that’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever experienced in all my life.”
“So you want to come swimming with me again?”
She laughed. “Sure.”
“Good.” He stood and extended a hand to help her to her feet. “I don’t come as often as I’d like. I’ve been wanting to bring Olivia out with me.”
“No!” Her legs wobbled and shook as they walked back up the beach to the hunk of driftwood where they had left their stuff. “How?”
“A paddleboard would be best, but getting it down to the beach would be tough. I’ve been thinking of getting one of those inflatable paddleboards so I could blow it up down here. We could put life vests on the girls and take them out on the board.”
She looked over her shoulder at the crashing waves. “Just getting them past the surf would be rough.”
“It’s not always this crazy. We could go on a calmer day.”
“That would be amazing. Rory loves dolphins.”
“Olivia too.”
Lani gulped all of her water in one go and then wished that she had brought more.
“If I had any idea how long we’d be out there for, I would have brought tea and snacks.”
“I should have brought more water.” Tenn stood and stretched. “You kick back and relax. I’ll go buy us a couple of coconuts.”
“You’re going to climb down with two coconuts? How?”
He chuckled. “I’ll manage. It’s not that steep.”
“It’s pretty steep.” She slumped back against the warm sand. “I’d come and help you, but after that swim, I don’t know how I’m going to make it up to the car, much less climb up there twice.”
