The LIttle Mermaid Meets The Guardian

Today is the last full day that we are all going to be together. It is going to be so hard to leave all of these girls.

To finalize our trip we got to swim with dolphins! Yes, we swam with real dolphins in the middle of the Bay of Islands! Yes, I swam with real dolphins, in the middle of the Bay of Islands, in the ocean, in New Zealand. It was Awesome I can now officially check swimming with dolphins off of my bucket list.

This was quite the experience. We Got onto our catamaran and set sail. The weather was kind of freaky though because we were going out into the middle of the ocean at the end of a cyclone. This meant that there were about 3meter swells and really windy. This made it tricky when we were looking for the dolphins. Since we were in the wild we had to physically look for the fins of the dolphins in the water. Even though the swells were huge we found them at last!

When we found them they basically gave us a lecture on if we don’t think that we are confident swimmers or have never used snorkel gear before that we should not go into the water. I think that they were just trying to freak us out so we didn’t want to get into the water. It didn't work for me. 

We quickly got our flippers on and snorkels and got ready to go. We sat on the bench at the back of the boat. The guide screamed "Go!" and we just started jumping in one by one and swimming with all that we had to catch the dolphins.

It was absolutely amazing! As soon as we caught up to the dolphins I was blown away! The dolphins literally got so close to us that you could reach out and touch them. Unfortunately you cannot touch them because their skin is apparently very sensitive.

I never realized just how social dolphins really are. They were seriously right next to the boat the entire time! All 15 of the dolphins were surrounding the boat and splashing us. This was so much better than Sea World.

That night we had a special FHE. It was really nice to have all the girls together for a final FHE. We had a lesson on budgeting and then we had an activity. We each had a piece of paper with our names on it and then we passed it around for everybody to write us a little message. It was fun to reflect on each person and pull out qualities that make them special and write about fun memories.