Prom Night...

No, Joan and I are not going to a geezer prom.  When we were working for the whale watch company, we were fortunate to see J, K, and L Pods come together.  There is a greeting ceremony, social interaction, and... sometimes, mating.  I called it "Prom Night."  Some of you will get that.  Dolphins are the only other mammals besides humans who have sex for recreation.

Not just the Orcas (the largest members of the dolphin family)... today, we were treated to a lot of great behavior with our local bottlenose dolphins, including spy hops, tail slaps... and mating.

Yep.  Prom Night.

And, just like back when we had the studio, we took a lot of photos today - over 400.  Culling out the duplicates and near misses, there are still over 250 images to go through.

After 3 days of gusty winds, it was a delight to head out today with the wind at about 3 miles per hour!  Heading out the canal, I took a couple shots of birds thinking they were hiding...

In the turning basin, we saw 3 large ocean tugs...

Some speculation amongst our crew (that would be Joan and me) about what they might be doing there.  Yep, just speculation.

Heading towards the ship channel, we could see a Gulf shrimper and a smaller bait shrimper ahead...

Water temperature is 81.7º, as you can see on the chartplotter above.

Then, before we got to the ship channel - dolphins!  This boat also stopped for a moment to check them out...

Then, blasted off, leaving us with the only boat by the dolphins...

Yeah, they swam up to our boat... I think they like it when Joan sings to them.  Something soothing, like Led Zeppelin.  ;-)

Before heading into the ship channel, with the dolphins swimming on both sides of us, Joan took these shots of the birds on the small island there...

On with the dolphin viewing.  No, I'm not going to post over 200 dolphin photos, but here are some highlights...

The start of the dolphin nookie - NSFW if you are a dolphin (animal behavior for the rest of us)...

Joan and I were both shooting - she, with a DSLR, me with a pocket camera.  I was at the helm, shooting mostly wide shots, while she got the closer stuff from the front of the boat.  Here's one shot we both captured...

The DSLR shot above, the small camera shot below...

OK, back to the dolphins fooling around...

Joan declared this: The Season of Tail...

All the above action happened within the first hour of being out today.  We moved east in the ship channel.  The dolphins followed...

All around the boat...

Did I mention: more nookie...

OK, that's as much as you're going to see.  Really.  Even if you enlarge 'em.

We made our way out to the jetties...

Pretty hazy looking out towards the Gulf.  This guy was not bothered by us motoring by...

A Coast Guard boat blew by us, heading out to the Gulf...

Joan took the helm, giving me a chance to stretch out and look around...

We saw dolphins here and there as we motored up the ship channel, but just kept bopping along.  When we got to the "Y" (our turn towards home), we did see some dolphins and a got the chance to wave bye to them...

A few more boats crossing our path...

A spectacular day on the water.  More dolphins than we've ever seen here in one day.  And, a new world record for this blog for the number of images in a single post (and I left a lot of other good ones on the cutting room floor... OK, not really, I don't have a cutting room floor).

Back home, I downloaded the images from both cameras, knowing it was going to take me a couple hours to go through them all and decide which to work up and post.  Joan wanted to look through them, too.  She put a thumb-drive on the TV to check 'em out...

A pretty special day here in the Tropical Tip!