This morning we return to East Point Fishing Beach before sunrise, this time we drive.  We have the entire tip of the island to ourselves, there are no other cars or bicycles here yet.  It’s awesome.

We take a walk on the gulf side and Hector starts frolicking in the dunes with his camera.  I join him, the dunes have lots of plant life and are beautiful.  This is why traffic to the beach has been limited.  We walk back to the car, grab a couple of chairs and hang out for awhile.  We see a few dolphins out in the distance.

We leave our chairs at the beach and drive back to the campsite to take Angel out for her morning walk and have breakfast.  Then we drive back out.  We’d decided yesterday that   this would be a great spot to take out our new inflatable kayak.

It’s a little cloudy and windy so we take a walk over to explore the bay side.  The walk gets longer and longer as we find many interesting things, more birds, inland ponds with egret and blue heron, trees washed up on shore, what looks like bobcat tracks on the sand…

On our way back from the walk, the sun comes out.  It’s really calm out.  This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.   We had the idea to get an inflatable kayak when we saw a bunch of them at Oxbow Bend River in Yellowstone National Park.  We researched a bit and found a Zoik at an RV show.  We’ve been really itching to try it out but the rivers in Arkansas were too low due to the drought they had this summer.

We open up the kayak and get the electric and foot pumps out.  I’m thinking that the process is going to take a really long time, but we inflate it and get the seats in it in no time.  Then we carry it over to the beach and off we go.  Since this is our maiden voyage and it’s late afternoon, we plan to paddle for just an hour or so just to test it out.  We head over to the gulf side and realize the seats don’t feel quite right so we paddle to the shore to adjust them.  Then we turn around and paddle over to the bay side.

We’re not out there fifteen minutes when we see more dolphins.  We paddle towards them and suddenly they’re everywhere.  They’re swimming towards us, in front of us, behind us, next to us.  When they get just so close, they swim away from us.  We paddle towards them again and we are surrounded again.  Then, they swim towards the beach, and some of them are jumping out of the water.  A couple has arrived at the beach and they are on the shore enjoying the show.  We continue to paddle around, chasing the dolphins.  They swim toward us then away from us multiple times.  The Zoik is handling beautifully in the water.

The sun is getting low in the sky, so we paddle in.  We meet the couple on the beach and chat about the dolphins.  The man hands Hector his card and tells him that he took photos of us in the kayak and would send them to us.  As Hector and I are leaving we see a dolphin out in the distance.  An auspicious maiden voyage, so we end the day by christening our kayak “The Dolphin”.

~ Brenda