Florida Trip - Day 4: Swimming With Manatees

This was our free day without any group activities planned (except for dinner).  My dad had signed us up to swim with the manatees.  We started out by getting dressed and eating breakfast at the hotel buffet.  

Then it was time for us to walk over to the dock area to get ready for our outing.  We first had to sign some wavers and then put on our wet suits.  The guy at the shop didn't ask for our sizes, he just looked at us and gave us some suits.  I was most worried about getting on the wet suit.  They are definitely not for large gals.  It was not easy, but I did get it on.  I quickly realized that my suit was just way too tight.  My large arms were not happy in that suit.  So, I went and asked for a larger size, and I was much happier with that.  We then got some pretty sweet pictures of us all in our wet suits.  We were looking good!

There were 11 of us from our group on this trip to swim with the manatees.  They took us out in the boat from the hotel to the sanctuary area where we are allowed to swim with them.  There were a lot of rules when swimming with manatees.  You are not allowed to touch them, pet them, swim towards them, anything.  You are allowed to snorkel in the water and watch the manatees go by.  The manatees can come up to you and you are supposed to just observe.  

When we first got into the water, we were really surprised at how many huge fish were swimming just below our feet.  It was amazing that we never even felt them.  The divers told us not to kick our feet to swim, we were supposed to just doggy paddle around in the water.  That was hard for me to follow.  We did see a lot of manatees.  They would just swim by people or under people, so that was cool.  I was hoping that we could interact more with the manatees, so that was disappointing.  After about an hour I started getting lightheaded and seasick.

So, I decided to head back to the boat.  It seemed to take me forever to swim back to the boat. I was very happy when I got onto the boat.  It was a cooler day and very cloudy, so I was so cold when I got back to the boat.  My mom was already on the boat.  She had enough of the manatees.  I took off my wet suit and felt much better in my jacket.  They had coffee and hot chocolate for all of us.  It was funny because we all wanted the hot chocolate instead of the coffee.  We were the hot chocolate boat.  Not everyone from our tour group was LDS, but most of us were.  Not long after Julie and my dad joined us, and then the rest of our group came too.  It was a neat experience, and we were all glad that we did it.