A VERY SPECIAL DAY ON THE WATER by Annabelle Kline

On the waters of Mercury Bay, there is magic to be found.

Coach Jonathan and his daughter Annabelle, experienced this first hand over the weekend. Here is Annabelle’s story of the moment —

“When we launched our Hobie Cat, we were a little disappointed that we didn’t have more wind, then my dad saw it, the first fin.

It was black and had a pointy tip. It was jagged on the back side of its fin. It was a large orca, a bull. We started to follow him then I spotted two more; the first one had a dorsal fin as tall as my dad.

There were eight killer whales in all. They started heading for the estuary so we kept following. They entered but we ran out of wind; it was our lucky day because the tide was going out so we tacked and got spat out of the estuary.

We decided that the orca would come back out soon so we sailed down towards the hole In the rock then the wind died and my dad said, “ the wind is meant to be picking up not dropping.” So we tacked again and started to zig zag our way up the bay when I said there is something black about two hundred or so meters up.

The wind was light, the boat creaked and finally we were off again towards Shakespeare Cliff, then close enough to see the orca. We got some great videos of them. There were babies and mothers together swimming back out to sea. Suddenly we looked behind us and there were three teenage orca looking as if they were going to bite our rudder.

Dad wiggled and wiggled the rudder and they finally stopped trying to bite it and swam away. So that was our amazing Saturday. My dad always says you can find magic when you sail.”

By Annabelle Kline, age 10