I Touched A Dolphin!

I am a lucky bastard
I had scheduled a dive right after my arrival on Rangiroa. We went to dive along the coral reef near the Tiputa Pass that you can see below



I was the less experienced of all the divers (only 15 dives) so I stayed close to the instructor. We went diving along a reef that was going slowly into the blue, when looking down one could see very far in the depth of the ocean.
You can find 2 kinds of totally different landscapes in this pass:
- on one side the reef offers a lot of small and medium sized fishes with many colors, morays that are hiding in holes, turtles which are eating the moss hidden below the dead coral.
- on the other you have the deep blue sea with swarms of fishes, sharks and dolphins.



Before my dive, i had been warned that there was a possibility to see some dolphins but i forgot all that as soon as i was underwater: I was to busy trying to miss as little as possible. I was swimming close to the instructor when we both saw 2 shades far away, with a few palm strokes we were close enough to see that we got lucky!



2 dolphins were swimming side by side, we all swam as fast as we could to miss as little as possible from the great show the dolphins were offering us, we all wanted to bring back a nice shot of them. All of a sudden, 3 other dolphins appeared behind the first 2 and 2 more appeared right behind us. We were all very excited and were looking everywhere.



At one point, 2 dolphins started swimming my way, as i was a little bit above them i started emptying the air in my lungs to go down without scaring them away. We ended up side by side long enough for me to put my hand on the back of one of them and let it slide till the tail. It felt like leather dipped in oil, it truly was a weird feeling.



Then the dolphins decided it was time for them to stop playing with us and started swimming too fast for us to follow. I hope that tomorrow's dive will be that nice.