Sea Kayaking with Dolphins II

(if you look at the top right of this photo you can see some dolphins. they’re super hard to capture with an iphone while sitting in a kayak floating on the open water!)

Last summer we did a sea kayaking adventure (with Eric from The Kayak Farm) that wound up being a Top Ten Life Experience and shot right to the top of our family’s list of Most Amazing Things We’ve Ever Done Together. It was awesome! So, this year, kayaking with Eric again was at the top of our Wish List for our time in South Carolina.

It was, once again this year, AMAZING.

Eric again did wonders for our family, giving us a private guided tour through the inlet between Fripp and Hunting Islands. He planned it perfectly — having us go at high tide this year (last year we went at low tide), giving us some new challenges (now that he knows us, he knows that our twinado 11-year-olds are capable of some pretty intense kayaking), and bringing us to a spot where he knows that a dolphin pod has been spending a lot of time this summer.

Highlight: At one point we were kayaking with the pod. We had dolphins swimming all around us. It seemed almost like they were putting on a show for us. I completely stopped paddling and just sat still amongst them for a while. As I sat in my kayak, on the water right in the middle of tons of dolphin activity, a mama and her baby swam right up to my kayak (literally! like, looking right up at me!), and then dove under, swam underneath my kayak, and popped up on the other side — blowing through their blow holes for me and flapping their tail fins. All within 10 feet of me (maybe 7 feet). IT WAS UNBELIEVABLY SPECTACULAR!!!

We kayaked through the maze-like marsh system, through and over the tall marsh grasses. Eric loves to point out the sea life and the incredible array of bird species and wildlife (he seems to know everything about all of it!), and answer Kyle’s 300.5 questions about everything sea-marsh-air-land.

We were on the water for 2.5 hours and every minute of it was a minute to savor and cherish.