What a day at the Bondi Icebergs today. Max temp hit 24ºC and the pool is a bath like 20.4ºC. The weekend swell had dissipated, smaller waves with glassy surface conditions made ocean swimming a pleasure. It's the best time of year and stranger still, nobody's here! You get the lane to yourself. Get out of bed you fools! You don't know what you're missing, it's not cold, just dark and there is no better place to watch the sunrise. I know some of you are sneaking off to those disgusting, indoor, chlorinated, overused, heated bacterial breeding grounds that pass themselves off as "good for you" pools. Wrong.
By 9:30 am today it was more summer than summer at Bondi and that's when the dolphins turned up. As many of you who swim the bay would know, the salmon are back (actually they are really a sea perch) in schools as large as we saw last year. One school was about 100 to 200m off the ocean end of the pool and the pod, of about 25 dolphins, went for them.
The rescue board was out of the office quick smart and close encounters of the Marine Mammal kind were had by two of the staff over the next 45 minutes (on their break of course). Our rescue board is 12 ft long and many of the dolphins were longer than that. Up close, this is a big animal. There were also babies with mothers. Sliding off the board with mask and snorkel, to have 7 dolphins, in close proximity, in 20 feet of water, is a memorable experience. All the time the water a cacophony of their clicks and whistles.
We’ve seen bigger pods over the past twelve months but they haven’t come as close as these. In general there has been a resurgence of marine life around the Bay, nearly always something to see and worth a snorkel in calm conditions.
This was a special day, bring on the whales!
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