rocket landing off of Hawaii

[TomK]

Yeah, TomK, that's how it's historically worked. You just drop the booster as garbage behind you and say goodbye to it.

That's not what I wrote. They planned to recover the booster, it's just that they didn't plan to do the flip maneuver until the first stage had stopped firing its engines and had released the second stage, as they have done in most of their launches. The plan was always to recover the booster. The video I linked to shows the whole process.