morning kayak with dolphins and kelp

It was a soft grey morning. Not yet summer, but the moisture in the air was more tropical than it was Tasmanian. Even when the drizzle set in, it was a really comfortable day on the water.

I paddled my kayak over towards the Alum Cliffs. I’ve done this dozens of times now, a simple low-effort high-reward adventure in the suburbs of nipaluna. The kayak cost me $50 on Marketplace from a lady up in the Turnip Fields. From memory she said she had it made in the 90s for kayaking over the shallow atolls and coral heads inside the Great Barrier Reef. It’s bright pink with splashes of Pacific Blue and weighs at least 30 kilograms. It’s been one of those silly purchases that reminds me that you don’t need a million bucks to enjoy the finer things in life. I’ve taken it on a few happy little jaunts, but the Alum Cliffs is where you will find us most often.

There’s a whole thrumming ecosystem on the reefs along the cliffs. Rays, leatherjackets, crayfish, flathead. Seaweeds of dark reds and maroons and browns and bright neon greens danced backed and forth on the gentle wash of waves.

Towards the southern-most point of the cliffs, where they turn the corner towards Kingston, the sudden rise of tall stands of kelp spooked me. Like apparitions just below the surface, their proximity unsettled me - as if they could reach out to me, or that if I wasn’t carefully their wafting fronds could hypnotize me and pull me into their world.

(insert bit about Giant Kelp)

This little jaunt was again a reminder of one of the lessons I’ve been ruminating on across the entire Whale River project: when you pay attention to one thing (in this case, whales), you pay attention to everything. And so it was that as I was staring out to sea wishing a whale to appear, a kelp gull launched off the cliff and rather than arc around me it went directly over my head - something that, by now, I had noticed they avoided if they could. I followed it’s arc from over my head then off to the east over my shoulder and right at that moment three dolphins surfaced in unison for breath.

I’ve come to rely more on these signs and impulses than almost anything else. A felt-sense of rightness, a pulse of recognition or knowing on a particular patch of water. Another animal willingly giving me hints, sharing gossip, of what else is going on around us. I would have missed the dolphins had the kelp gull not flown in that particularly curious way. Some may say coincidence, but I choose to believe, to acknowledge, that something more expansive and fun and generous was at play than simple change.

I followed the dolphins in the rain for a few hundred meters, wishing them over to pass under my kayak. They never did. They continued in the direction of Kingston, hugging the cliffs. Reflecting on it now I am imagining them gliding between the tall stands of kelp, brushing past fronds under the pitter-patter of rain.