<i>Bonk</i>. Something rocked the boat. Not overly concerned, Juliet paused in eating her ham and cheese sandwich, looked out of the cabin window, to make sure the boat hadn't dragged its anchor and drifted onto a shoal, or up onto the shallow beach. Nope, the craft was still anchored where she had been.<i> Bonk.</i>It rocked again. Okay, weird. Juliet picked her sandwich up and took a bite.<i>Bonk. </i>"Okay, enough  already!" She glared down at the side of the hull where the noise was coming from. "What's that old saying? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is deliberate? Gah! Dolphins! Too playful for their own good..." A soft clicking from outside confirmed her suspicion. She poked her head out of the cabin. "Get lost, you annoyingly beautiful things. Go tease some professional whale watchers...!" She looked around but didn't see any dolphins. That wasn't unusual though. The creatures were only seen when they wanted to be seen, usually.<br/><br/>She laughed as she headed back in to the cabin. In spite of her apparent annoyance it was almost impossible to be angry at the playful aquatic mammals. She had once watched a pod deliberately play with a group of professional whale watchers near a tourist resort on the island of Mauritius. There were five or six small boats, each loaded with tourists, who had been promised "An encounter with dolphins". And sure enough the pod had arrived, exactly on schedule. Juliet had watched, from her own small craft, as the pod had surfaced in one spot and submerged again. All the boats had converged on the spot. The pod had then surfaced across the other side of the large bay. The boats had all turned and raced to that place. The dolphins had waited until they were getting close and then dived again, to resurface back almost exactly where they were before. They clearly knew exactly what they were doing and were doing it on purpose. Or possibly on porpoise if you had a New York accent... Ha Ha,<br/><br/>She finished her sandwich, and drank some water, then checked her air bottles. She eased the wetsuit back up over her torso, removing the bikini top as she did. She left her hair loose. There was too much to fit in a dive hood anyway. She strapped her ballast belt around her waist. Mask on, air bottle on her back, regulator in her mouth and flippers on her feet, knife in her forearm sheath, shark-prod and sample bag dangling from her belt, she sat on the boat's gunwale facing inboard and rolled backwards into the water. The splash was quickly muffled as the sea filled her ears with its own distorted sounds. She rolled and kicked out, looking around in the beautifully clear water. The boat was well clear of anything that might have bumped the hull, the spade anchor dug firmly into the mud and sand, clearly visible a few metres below her. Something iridescent blue and gold flashed in the corner of her vision. Juliet turned as quickly as she could, which was not very quickly, not when Newton's third law came into play. Push against the water and it pushes back, but then you have to get your arms back in place to push again, which creates torque the other way and rotates you back. her hair drifted out and obscured her view and she brushed it out of the way with her arms. A blue blur glimpsed vaguely in the blue blur that was the Pacific Ocean, that was all she saw. She tried to think of any blue and gold fish that might inhabit these waters. Some kind of angel fish or grouper? Bloody big one!<br/><br/>She swam out towards the sandbar that protected this cove from the pacific rollers, making it almost a lagoon. At low tide, her keel would have cleared it by about a metre thanks to the boat's shallow draft. Juliet swam back towards the beach, hugging the sea bed, about six metres down. Fish swirled about her suddenly, blue and gold. Golden Trevally, one of the most common fish in the Pacific. A shoal of the critters must have become trapped in the cove, possibly washed in by a storm? They swirled around her, and Juliet laughed aloud with joy. This was what she lived for!