Dolphins!

Today has been a good day.

Since it seemed a shame to come to the coast and not get on a boat, Terri and I booked ourselves on a 90 minute dolphin-watching cruise in the bay. It was to leave at 1:30pm, so we had most of the morning to wander around the shopping district of Nelson Bay. Spoiler: there wasn't a lot. We had a look in a couple of shops that I've come to refer to as "everything shops", and I picked up a key ring. Which reminds me, I haven't told you about my key rings yet. That'll be for another post.

After stopping to have a smoothie at a juice bar, we made our way to the marina. We stood in a queue on the dock for quite a while before embarking, and the ship was about 5 minutes late departing.

For a while there we didn't think we'd actually see any dolphins when suddenly, there they were.

Now, I did have my good camera with me - I figured that having the zoom lens would be worth carrying it about, and I was right. There were a lot of people on the boat, and most of them were trying to get photos with their camera phones. Don't get me wrong - a camera phone is extremely useful, and sufficient for most purposes. But for this particular purpose, nope.

Turns out it's pretty hard to take photos of wild dolphins anyway, even with a zoom lens. I think you'd need to be underwater or something to get good shots. I took something like a hundred photos of the dolphins, and these five are the only ones in which you can really see all that much. Dolphins like to be under the water, you see. They only surface in order to breathe. That makes it hard to zoom, focus and compose a shot.

I got to the point where I was doing something that I've been meaning to teach myself to do anyway, which is to keep both eyes open when taking the shots. One eye looks through the viewfinder, while the other is free to take in the whole scene. With practice, I found that I could overlap the view from one eye with the view from the other, and choose which eye my brain paid attention to at any given moment. That made it quite a lot easier to catch those elusive shots where the dolphin only surfaced for a fraction of a second.

Of course, I had to keep the camera focused on the surface of the water, but I was able to do that because of the flashing red lights in the viewfinder. Anyone who's used the viewfinder on a DSLR (rather than composing shots on the external screen) should know what I'm talking about here. You can half-press the shutter button and the lights will flash if you're focused on what you're pointing at.

It was a pretty pleasant ride. It wasn't rough or particularly windy, and the rain that has been hanging around since we arrived in the area had pretty much gone completely away by the time we got onto the water.

After we had returned to shore we went back to our room for a couple of hours before going to dinner, which we had in a pub on the bay shore called Mavericks. We chose this particular place because Terri wanted a seafood grill and they seemed to have the best value. The meal was... good. It wasn't great, but it was good. The salt and pepper squid in particular was excellent. The dessert menu only had a couple of things on it, but I think that was because there was an ice creamery just across the square. So that's where we had our dessert. The banana split may just have been the best thing in the world at that moment.