When I was around seven years old my family decided that it was time for us to take a trip down to Florida and go to Disney and then head over to Daytona Beach. We decided I needed a buddy to take with me, and so Cousin Randy went with us. Because we wanted to save money where we could, we decided to drive down there. On the way down, when you are coming out of Georgia and heading into the northern part of Florida, you are driving on a large highway that is very straight in one section. I remember looking up from my Gameboy and seeing that our side of the highway was empty, with no cars at all. However, on the other side of the highway, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I mentioned this to dad and he thought this was odd as well. So turning on the radio, we discovered that Florida was being evacuated because Hurricane Andrew was going to be hitting Florida very soon. Now I don’t know about your dad, but my dad’s reaction to this news was to comment that he would be able to get some really cool video with his camcorder while we were down there. And so we continued our trek down into the sunshine state. Our first stop was at Disney and our first park was supposed to be The Magic Kingdom. Now, I have been to Disney several times since this first trip and have never had the same experience as we did the first time we went.

Upon entering the park, there is a large boulevard running down the middle of the park with Cinderella’s Castle at the end of the road. The road is lined with shops, restaurants, and little boutiques. Every other time I have been to this park, there have been so many people crowding this area, that you can barely see five feet in front of you and are shoulder to shoulder the entire time. It is always packed. However, this first time we went, there were maybe twenty people on that boulevard. No one was in the part hardly at all.

You might think I am exaggerating, but I am not. Normally, each ride has a good hour-long wait to get on it. We walked directly on every ride we wanted to. No, wait at all. In fact, we rode a couple of the rides twice. By lunchtime, we had ridden every ride we wanted to ride in the Magic Kingdom. We went back to the hotel to eat, then decided to go over to the Animal Kingdom to check it out. By dinner, the time we had experienced everything we wanted to at the Animal Kingdom as well. When I tell you it was the best Disney Vacation we have ever had, it’s not an exaggeration. It only rained once, for about twenty minutes.

After our time at Disney, we went over to Daytona Beach. This is where things get a little more interesting. The storm had begun to really become fierce. There were days we were stuck in the hotel room because of torrential rain. Dad was having a ball filming it all and mom kept asking if we needed to get to the first floor of the hotel since she believed we would be blown away. Dad informed her that if we were lower, we were much more likely to be flooded so it was better to stay on the higher floors. I don’t think that made her feel better.

So on Randy and I’s first trip down to the sand, we decided that playing in the surf was the best idea. However, that idea was quickly dashed when we realized that about every twenty minutes or so, a ten-foot-high wave would come along and crash so hard on us that we thought it would rattle our teeth loose. So we moved a little further out into the water so that it was about up to our waste. For some reason, the waves were not nearly as bad at that depth, but it presented a new problem for us; jellyfish.

Apparently, the storm had blown in a very large school of quarter-sized jellyfish. Their tentacles weren’t but three to four inches long, but they could still sting, and sting they did, a lot! The problem was, it wasn’t a bad sting. Let me explain. With a normal jellyfish sting, it hurts bad enough that a little kid might be done swimming for the day. But these little jellies weren’t terrible, and that was the issue. It wasn’t a bad enough sting to make you get out of the water. I would compare the sting to the bite of a horsefly. So you would yelp, and swat at the water, but then keep on going, with only a little red line to show where they had got you.

At the end of the first day, we came up out of the water and it looked like we had red spider webs all over our legs. That’s how many sting lines we had down our legs. Not that we minded really though, we played that entire day in the ocean. So it wasn’t that bad, but by the next day, we were ready to see if there was another way to have fun. Other than swatting at jellyfish.

The deeper out into the ocean we went, the fewer jellies there seemed to be. So we moved out deeper and deeper, which, thinking about it now was very foolish; considering rip tides and what I am about to tell you about. Either way though, we moved further and further out into the ocean until we were around a football fields length out in the water. It was around ten feet deep at this point. We were diving for shells. Both of us were expert swimmers even at such a young age and had no trouble diving to the bottom to search in the dark for the shells.

We had been out in the water for around ten minutes or so and were treading water. We were facing each other talking, I was facing towards the shore, and Randy facing out to sea. Suddenly, as I was swimming there, a large fin rose up out of the water, just behind Randy. It passed by him and silently slipped back down into the water. I was almost speechless, but managed to sputter out,

“R-R-Randy… th-th-theres a shark!”

His eyes went wide, “Where?”

“Just behind you.”

“Well we gotta get outa here then!” he said.

We started swimming as fast as we could back towards the shore, but we only made it about halfway back, before three more fins rose from the water just in front of us. We stopped dead in our tracks. But should take a moment and explain something to you. In the ocean, there are two main types of fins that you should know about. One of them, is a large triangle, like the one I saw just behind Randy. It was nearly a foot long with crisp edges. The other type of fin though is more like the crest of a wave, where the tip of it curls back. This second type of fin was the type we were seeing now, the three of them begin to circle us.

As you may have guessed, this second type of fin is not a shark fin, but a dolphin fin. The three dolphins were about eight feet from where we now trod water and slowly circled us. We were scared, of course. Dolphins are big animals and these weren’t the trained ones you see in Sea World, but wild dolphins of the Atlantic. However, as we continued to swim towards shore, they kept up with us, circling us the whole way into the breaks where we could stand.

Now, I don’t know how you would have taken that situation, but from that day forward, I have believed that the dolphins were protecting Randy and me from the shark. So that’s the story of how Randy and I went to Florida during Hurricane Andrew and nearly got eaten by a shark, only to be saved by dolphins. True story.

D. Michl Lowe