Lovely day!

Oh yes, it was really perfect today!  I was eager to get out on the water  today since tomorrow I have to spend the day getting a repair on my car.  Everything looked perfect, until about ten minutes into paddling, a wind kicked up from the south!  I had to paddle against it all the way down to the boat ramp and I wondered if it was going to get even more windy.  When I arrived at the boat ramp, the wind backed off and it was back to being perfect!  How lucky!  No one else was there either, but it seemed that turtles weren’t around either.  I waited for quite a while until finally the first turtle surfaced.  I hustled over to it and it was friendly!  Then there were no turtles again for a while….until I spotted two turtles out farther.  I paddled out to sit between them and I recognized one of the turtles as being one of the babies, since it was so small!  It was inquisitive…..and it dove down and swam under my board.  Then another lull….until one more turtle popped up to greet me!  Then I ran into a couple of paddling friends and they told me that the other day one of them had a twelve-foot tiger shark following him down by Charley Young beach!!  Wow…..and he said he reported it to the lifeguards who acted like it was no big deal!  I’d think it was a big deal if a shark was following me, wouldn’t you?  Then I decided to paddle back since not much was happening at the boat ramp, but just as I started back, I ran into a big turtle and so I hung around with it for a few minutes.  That was only four turtles for the day!  As I was passing Kam III, I ran into another paddling friend, so we chatted for a few minutes and paddled north.  Suddenly a turtle appeared, and then another one, and then another one!  Now I was up to seven turtles.  The conditions stayed so nice that we paddled all the way down to Cove Park, but on the way, the guy that owns one of the boats called to me and asked if I wanted a cocktail!  He was having a Labor Day party on his boat!  It was so nice out on the water that it was hard to come in, but I wanted to swim while it was nice.  On the way in, another big turtle surfaced and then dove down.  I watched it swimming near the bottom.  The water clarity is perfect right now!  Then I continued to paddle in and suddenly I spotted two very bright blue fish, so I followed them around for a while and then suddenly there were four of them!  I don’t know how long I followed those four fish around, but I really wanted to see if I could identify them.  They were too bright blue for Ulua’s…..but I just don’t know what type of fish they were.  It stayed nice all the way through my swim and just started to get windy again about the time I left.  It was a very lovely Labor Day!!!