This last weekend the Durant family took a two-day vacation to Galveston in southern Texas. The weather was beautifully warm--I love the heat, remember--and the water perfect. Of course, I had to get used to the nasty, salty taste of the sea which made me feel sick if I got much in my mouth. But that didn't prove to be much of a damper on the fun we had.
Gina, Jon, Seth, and I walked way out into the ocean...it never really got very deep where we were at...and played Giants, and all sorts of fun stuff. We found baby jellyfish that were clear and not at all painful to touch. They looked and felt like snot and at first it was quite creepy to have them brush against you in the water. They didn't really swim, I don't think, but just floated around and lots got stuck on the beach. After awhile we got used to them and tried to see who could catch the biggest one.
The second day at the beach we found lots of hermit crabs in the mud, of all sizes. Some were very tiny and several were quite as big as your thumb. We put them in the shallow and watched them come out of their shells and either bury themselves in the sand or begin scuttling back toward the sea. They were very curious! Seth even found a tiny crab on a length of muddy rope he pulled out of the mud.
The height of our vacation was on the second day when we were out swimming. Gina, Jon, Seth, and I had all gone out deep up to our chests again. We played some more giant and just swam around in the waves. There weren't very many because it was a rather calm day and the sea was pretty flat. Suddenly I looked behind me, and then Gina and Jon did too. We saw a black dorsal fin about twenty feet out from us, swimming parallel to the shore. Without a word we all took off for shore with a great deal of splashing--the thought crossed my mind that the shark might hear us and come after the noise if it hadn't noticed us there already! We were deathly frightened--so much so that nobody said a word. After a moment I got my breath and shouted to Mom and Dad at the shore with the little boys, "Shark!" The others immediately echoed the cry. I looked behind us and saw the fin come up again, and another a few feet behind it. There were two!
As I looked behind us, I thought--"better make sure we're all here"--and just then Seth popped up out of the water, just where we all used to be standing. He had been digging for hermit crabs and had just found a great big one. As he wiped the water out of his eyes I saw the dorsal fin appear again right behind him! Gina and I started shouting at him to swim back, there was a shark, and we weren't kidding! He looked a little alarmed and started wading back...but not fast enough for us! We shouted for him to hurry faster!
Thankfully, the fins turned out to be dolphin fins, and Seth got back to the shallow quite safe. But after that, we didn't go out so far. We didn't even stay much longer on the beach. But we did have a good laugh at ourselves, and so did the few people swimming around us. (the beach was pretty deserted that day) The boys all said they wished it would have really been a shark so that we could say we had escaped after being really close to one. But me--I'm just glad the incident turned out as it did.
No comments:
Post a Comment