In this post devoted primarily to our dolphin sight-seeing boat trip, arranged through Kelly GrayLine, you'll see not only dolphins, but seabirds -- tons of them -- as well as a shrimp boat bedecked with lots of those seabirds; and the old Cockspur Island Lighthouse, all off or near Tybee Island, Ga.
At the very end, I'll include some pictures of my time spent actually on the island's north beach, which included a climb of 178 steps to the top of the Tybee Island Lighthouse, the tallest lighthouse in Georgia, and pictures taken from the top of that lighthouse.
The Cockspur Island Lighthouse, the state's smallest lighthouse, is now inactive as a navigational aid. It sits on a tiny islet off Cockspur Island. And while inactive, there is a functioning light at the top that is for display purposes only.
While out on the water, our boat captains challenged us to take selfies with a minimum of two dolphins in the background. I was shooting with my Canon 6D, so I was not about to try any selfies. (Besides, I wasn't interested in doing selfies on a bumpy-cruise boat; I feared dropping my phone overboard!)
But I had another issue going on. The glare was such that I was never quite sure I was either seeing dolphins as they surfaced alongside our boat or just guessing that I was seeing them. It wasn't until I got home from the trip and started processing the images that I saw that, indeed, I had been seeing them, and in one case, I had eight dolphins evident in a single frame. I'm not talking full-figure dolphins; I mean some portion of the sea mammal -- mostly its fin or partial bodies -- was evident in the frame. I also had a few with seven, and others with smaller numbers.
And yes, that eight-dolphin shot is the one leading off the post. If you need help counting, you can click on the photo and then magnify the size. There are three on the right side of the frame and five on the left. The three on the right are lined up vertically -- there's the splasher in the foreground, the decent-sized fin in the middle and the tiny fin (likely a baby) at the top, close to the shrimp boat. And then if you look to the left side of the image, you can see closest to the camera the bodies and one fin of two together in the middle. Closer to the top of the frame, there are three fins visible from left to right. The one on the far left is tiny, which could mean another baby.
Again, I had no idea I had all these in the picture at the exact moment I took the photo. That's how bad the glare was on the water, even though I was using a polarizing filter.
Any beach you see in the background of shots is Tybee Island. The restaurant facade you see is North Beach Grill on the island itself. North Beach Grill is home to the amazing Cruzan Confusion mixed drink.
And from the image perspectives, you should be able to figure out which shots were taken from the top of the Tybee Island Lighthouse. The few shots before those and the very last shot of the post (of the lighthouse itself) were taken from the ground near the lighthouse.
And now, the pictures.
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