Dolphins for fun!!

Tues 28 July… So that was Coffs Harbour a very nice place though our stay there was spoilt a little by the incompetent garage people. We have come north to an excellent campsite, just 7K’s short of Byron Bay called Broken Head. It’s right on good surfing beach, the boys were in it within 10 mins of arriving.
We are 250K’s further north and gradually moving into the subtropics, albeit in the middle of winter. We are back in sugarcane country, though they not harvesting it yet as they are further north. The journey up was fairly uneventful, stopped for lunch in a park in Ballina then stopped again at a lookout point where we got our first view of the bay.
At Broken Head we all headed for the beach, the boys with their surf boards and us with our cameras. It’s a beautiful day and there weren’t many people on the beach. Whilst the boys were surfing, we spotted a large pod of dolphins quite close inshore. They appeared to be working as a team, shepherding a large shoal of fish towards the shallows into a tight group, making it easier for them to feed. As they rounded the fish up the dolphins thrashed the water with their tails to manoeuvre the fish, it was fascinating to watch. We watched for ages and waded into the surf to get within a few metres of them but were pretty hopeless with the cameras. Fish near the surface were getting picked off by shearwaters plunging into the sea from a height. Once the dolphins had finished their feeding frenzy they just cruised up and down in surf not much more than a metre deep, “having their pudding” the Navigator said! We hope to see them again tomorrow.