Rainbows and dolphins

Rainbows have always been a good luck charm for me. On several occasions in my life, rainbows have appeared just when I needed them--to boost me up from despair or give me a competitive edge or just give me the reassurance that everything was going to be all right. Lately, dolphins have been that same kind of lucky charm for Wil and I when out on our boat.

Sometimes, when the Gulf is calm enough for our little boat, we'll cruise just outside the Destin pass where there are always dolphins around. We follow them around as they cavort around the boat. Occasionally, we have been lucky enough to find them in the sound. Lately, that has been happening more often. I don't know if the dolphins are in the sound more often or if we have gotten better at spotting them or if we've just been lucky.

Today, while headed toward Crab Island with Madison and Riley, we found a pod of 6 or so dolphins just west of the Brooks Bridge at Ft. Walton Beach. They were swimming in the channel just ahead of us. We slowed down to a crawl and followed them. I videoed them swimming, surfacing, even jumping out of the water ahead of us and beside us. A couple of times, they swam under the boat. One flipped over on his back and stared up at us as we stared down at him. The smallest ones in the pod were especially playful, jumping out of the water right next to the boat.

Finally, we left them behind and headed on our way. Wil remarked about how lucky our day was going to be since we saw dolphins. It was a great day. The sun shone as we floated and played and swam and ate. Then around 4 pm, we decided to head out so that we would have some time for tubing on the way home.

As we left Crab Island, I saw the sky darkening to the northeast. Then Wil saw a raincloud ahead of us to the west. It was not a large storm, but you could see the rain pouring down. I pulled up radar on a weather app on my iPhone and realized that we were positioned between two storms. The smaller one ahead of us was moving south and the large line of storms behind us was moving south southwest.

Our challenge was to move slow enough to allow the storm ahead of us to blow by, but fast enough to out run the storm behind us. We dawdled around the Brooks Bridge nervously waiting for the weather radar to update every few minutes and glancing over our shoulder watching the sky darken ominously.

Finally, we decided that we could cruise ahead full steam and just the storm in front of us. Our little old boat did us proud, running at top speed, even though the water was quite rough, having been churned up a bit by the squall that had blown through. The sun broke through and shone brightly, even as the dark line of storms to the east chased us.

We raced back to the boat launch at Navarre. We trailered the boat and unloaded it. We headed to wash the boat and get it put away before the storm hit. We knew it would be a race. However, just as we headed back to the mainland over the Navarre Beach Bridge, Madison spotted a rainbow. The whole rainbow wasn't visible, but the end of it glowed against the black storm clouds.

We sped to the self-serve car wash and rinsed the salt water off of the boat. The sky got darker. We hurried home and unloaded our stuff from the truck while Wil flushed the boat's engine. We began to see lightning in the distance. We drove the boat back to the storage lot. Thunder rumbled ominously. In record time, we got the boat cover on and got the boat unhitched.

As Wil drove the truck out of the gate, the lightning was close enough that I was nervous holding on to the metal gate to close it. I even got my hand stuck in the chain link fence at one point, trying to get the lock cable through so that I could lock it. I managed to get it done just as Wil hopped out of the truck to help me. We both jumped back into the truck and breathed a big sigh of relief.

A minute later, as we turned for home, the rain came. With the rain came bright flashes of lightning and deep rumbles of thunder. We had barely gotten the boat safely put away in time.

But then again, with dolphins and a rainbow in our day, how could we be anything but lucky!