I assure you that few things could get me willingly up and out the door by 6 a.m., but a combination of boating and seeing one of my favorite creatures in their natural habitat — in this case, dolphins — had me watching the sunrise from a small fishing boat tooling out of Playa Marinero.

Our party was truly international, with me as the sole American along with a couple from the Czech Republic, a guy from Germany, a guy from England and a woman from South Africa (and, of course, our Mexican boat captain and first mate). The trip was billed as a fishing expedition in which you were guaranteed to see spinner dolphins, sea turtles and other marine critters, but none of us passengers paid much attention to the fishing part. Our boat cruised up and down the mouth of the large port, with us scanning the shimmering morning waters for movement.

Before long, shrieking flocks of seabirds circled a big school of fish, and where there are fish, there are dolphins. Our boat turned in that direction and headed over. It wasn’t long before we could see a pod of dolphins among the cacophony of birds, just their silver-finned backs undulating out of the water, creating a bubbly ripple effect over the choppy blue-gray waters. They scattered when we cruised up. We kept going like this, following the birds, and either the dolphins got more comfortable with us or we found different dolphins — because after that they started swimming right alongside our motorboat, riding the wake, keeping up with our speed, weaving in and out of the surface of the water, so close that I was worried our boat was going to whack one of them (it didn’t).

At one point, three of them started bursting — and I do mean bursting — way up out of the water, one after the other, almost as though they were seeing who could jump the highest. Maybe they wanted to provoke a response from those of us in the boat — if that was their intent, they succeeded. We could hear them squeaking and screeching while they jumped. As long as I remember this, I will always wonder what, exactly, they were saying to each other. Luckily, it all happened on my side of the boat.

That was the only big show we got — but just being surrounded by racing, undulating dolphins, as we were, would have been enough. We also saw manta rays flying out of the water, but not nearly as close to us as the dolphins. I never knew rays jumped out of the water like that and wished I could have seen them closer; they looked like wiggly kites springing up from the ocean. We crossed paths with three or four big sea turtles, but their giant powerful flippers propelled them away before I could take a decent picture. Like the manta rays, they probably didn’t like us that much. We also saw one sea snake, a baby compared to some of the ones I’ve seen while diving in Southeast Asia, but our boat captain told us that this kind was poisonous. Eeep.

And here are some snaps from a truly stellar morning: