They were so majestic.  About a half-mile out, I would swim directly overhead a pod of dolphins swimming directly beneath me, maybe 7 or 8 meters down.  They’d swim slowly, all most like they were “letting” me keep up.  Then they’d gradually float up to the surface, let their dorsal fins break the surface a few meters ahead of me, take a breath or two, and then sink back down.  It was magical – so much that I could almost tune out the fact that I was surrounded by 30 to 40 other tourists, paddling furiously to catch a glimpse, and 5 or 6 boats, waiting to take the foreign tourists back to shore.

Somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, just off the southeast coast of Mauritius, there’s a GoPro camera with an SD card inside that has amazing footage of the scene I describe above.  I was fumbling with it at some point when I realized I was grasping at air, and looked down in the water to see it tumbling quickly into the darkness below.

Fortunately, I did manage to send the drone up overhead.  Hopefully you can imagine what it was like actually swimming just a few meters away from them…

UPDATE:  I’m told scientists found a USB stick inside seal poop that had been frozen for over a year and the images were still intact (read about it here)!  This means there is hope yet that my underwater dolphin footage will be recovered someday!