Some dolphin pictures from Bimini

I just got home after my 5th or 6th trip (I forget exactly) to Bimini Island in The Bahamas (half an hour's small plane ride from Ft. Lauderdale) to swim with free, wild dolphins. Wildquest (wildquest.com) takes people out in a day boat in the shallow (30 to 45 foot deep) waters off Bimini, looking for pods of wild dolphins. Typically, the dolphins come to the boat and swim on the bow of the boat. If they stick around for a while, the boat stops and we slide into the water and swim with them. Sometimes they swim away immediately. Sometimes they stick around and swim with us. Other times we stop at a shallow reef (5 to 15 or 20 feet deep) and snorkel.

I don't take my camera, but Atmo, one of the owners, takes pictures and puts them on a DVD for each week's trip to sell to participants. What follows are a few of the pictures with me in them.

 

Here are a few of just the dolphins.

 

This two-week trip was my best dolphin trip yet. You can never be certain of finding dolphins on a given day. My first time there, we only saw them three times, and only got in the water with them once. Last year I had to leave early, because I had something else scheduled, and didn't see a dolphin in the 4 days I was there. (It's a 5-day program, giving them 2 days to clean the boat and the rooms and rest between groups.)

But this year we swam with the dolphins all 5 days the first week, and 4 of the 5 days the second week. And the sea conditions were the best I've had them. It can get quite rough, and then I get seasick even with the most powerful prescription medicine there is. But this year it was nearly flat most days, and not too bad the couple of days it was not flat. And to top it off, this was my first trip there since I took freediving classes, so that this year, for the first time, I was able to swim to the bottom everywhere we went. (As I said above, it's never deep. The deepest we were was 13 meters according to my freediving computer. That's about 43 feet. Most places it was 10 or 11 meters (33 - 36 feet).

The only bad part is that you have to listen to a lot of nonsense about how the dolphins have psychic healing powers, or how they can read our minds or our "energy," and even worse, they tell you with a straight face that a bunch of concrete blocks (a nice snorkel spot called the Bimini Road) are the lost continent of Atlantis risen again. When you point out to them that Atlantis was a fiction, invented by Plato, and was never a real place, and that it was in the Mediterranean, not the Caribbean, and continents on one tectonic plate do not sink and then rise on another (plate tectonics were not known when the modern myth of Atlantis was invented) they reply that they can "feel the energy." It drives me bats to have to listen to such idiotic hogwash. However, they are nice people otherwise, and the place is beautiful, and the ocean is warm, and the fishes are pretty, and the dolphins are fun to swim with.

 

I will probably make it back to NZ some day. But it's a loooooooooooooong plane ride. And the older I get, the harder those long trips are. Fiji was hell getting to, and that's closer. Having a travel companion would help. Even Europe, which is easier to get to, is looking less and less appealing these days. If I had a girlfriend I'd really like to take her to Kenya. But we'd spend a week in Paris or Amsterdam to break up the trip and adjust to the time change. The local Scuba store is going to the Philippines, which apparently has fabulous diving. I'm not going because of the intolerable travel time.

It's not really wanderlust I have. It's activitylust. I like doing things which happen elsewhere than here. Hiking in B.C. (which is close because I chose Spokane for that reason) and warm-ocean activity, for which the Caribbean is the closest place.

 

I don't do cold water. My hands and feet get so cold it's painful. For the same reason, I don't do snow. Middle 70's (ocean water) is very cold for me. Most people consider that mild. I did a diving trip at middle 70's with a 5-mil wet suit, and got quite chilly by the end of the dives. I'd do it again if I had a girlfriend to help me warm up after. Probably not otherwise. I like it when the water is above 80 F. and the air is in the 90's with sun to warm me up when I get out.

I didn't do any water activities in NZ. I did snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef (was not yet a scuba diver). I seem to remember the water being nice. And the snorkeling was the best I've ever done. I'd do that again. But getting there is daunting. Some folks will jump on a jet for a 14-hour flight at the drop of a hat. They're made of sterner stuff than me.

 

We did see a few sharks over the course of the two weeks. One came quite close to the group of us before suddenly turning and dashing away when it realized we were there. It was very cool. Nobody got a picture of it, but these are of a similar shark that did not come as close, on a different day. I imaging they were both reef sharks, though, except for nurse sharks, which are distinctive, I cannot identify shark species.

 

I am a certified scuba diver. Open water and nitrox. I love scuba diving. I also love snorkeling and freediving. They are two very different ways to enjoy the same environment.

I'll apologize for being blunt, but that is a truly ignorant statement. Being attacked by a dolphin is about as likely as being attacked by a drawer full of socks. If that's a level of "risk" you are unwilling to take, you should never, ever, get in a car. It's more likely that a 747 will crash into your house, than that you'd be attacked by a dolphin.

There are, of course, cheaper vacations. Just as there are cheaper cars than the Prius. But for an all-inclusive Caribbean resort with outstanding food, great staff, and fun activities, this place is not a bad deal at all.

This is not to say anything against manatees. I gather they are amazing animals as well. But I also gather they pretty much ignore you, or maybe just sort of look at you. The dolphins interact with you in a much more active manner.

 

Dog bites, bee stings, airline crashes, drunk drivers, contaminated food, ALL kill thousands of times more people than dolphins. There has NEVER been an attack of a human by a dolphin in the waters off Bimini (where I go). Hell, Coke machines kill more people than sharks, and sharks, which very rarely attack people, do so far more often than dolphins.

Using your logic, you should never live where there are bees, dogs, lightning, or automobiles. You can live your whole life in fear of things that happen one time out of a hundred thousand, but as far as I'm concerned, that would be a pretty dull life.

 

Have you ever petted a dog? Dogs kill many people each year. But for the most part they are inoffensive (except the football dogs, that will drive you nuts with their constant yapping.)

Your notion of dolphins as "lethal" is absurd. Do you ever buy a soft drink from a machine? Coke machines kill more people than sharks, which in turn kill more than dolphins.

A google search turned up reports (no actual citations, for the most part) of about half a dozen (world-wide, over the entire history of human-dolphin encounters) very minor "attacks" by dolphins upon people, generally resulting from the human trying to touch the dolphin (something we're always asked not to do, as they are wild animals) or interfere with its feeding (we do not disturb them when they are feeding) or threatening its young (we do not approach them when there are newborns). There appears to be ONE documented case of a bottlenose dolphin killing a human. One. And there is the famous case of the orca at Seaworld. That one is generally considered to have been unintentional. And though orcas are indeed classified as dolphins, they are a very different animal, with very different habits and behaviors, than the dolphins that I and others swim with. At Bimini there are just two species: bottlenose and spotted dolphins, and the spotteds are the ones we swim with generally. The bottlenose most often swim away if we get in the water with them, and we do not give chase. If the animals want to leave, we let them go and look for a pod that wants to hang out with us.

Again, you present the flawed logic of all risk being equal. You are far more likely to be killed driving to the airport, or in a plane crash; you are far more likely to be killed because the boat sinks, or struck by lightning. The "risk" as you put it, is so infinitesimal as to be unworthy of concern, compared to all the thousands-of-times greater risk that you take just getting there, or even staying at home.

Again, by your logic, you should never have a dog because you could get bitten; you should never have a cat, because you could get cat-scratch fever; you should never step out of doors because you could get stung by a bee, you should go underground every time there is a cloud in the sky because you could get struck by lighting; and you should CERTAINLY never get in a car or cross a street or ride a bicycle.

Your arguments against dolphins are ludicrous. During about twenty years that two different companies on Bimini have been taking ten to twenty people out every day to swim with dolphins, and several other boat operators have taken occasional smaller groups out, there has not been one single dolphin bite or other attack in those waters. And two known deaths world wide makes swimming with dolphins safer than sleeping in your own bed!

I think you suffer from delfiniphobia: an irrational fear of dolphins.

 

P.S. And it's not that much money. Wildquest is one of the less-expensive places I visit, if you don't count the art I sometimes buy in Ft. Lauderdale on the way there or back. The REAL danger of going to Bimini to swim with dolphins is that you might end up spending more money on art in Ft. Lauderdale than you intended to do. There are two or three really exquisite art galleries on Las Olas Blvd.

 

Your posts do not inform. They spread FUD. Your risk assessment is nonsensical: The likelihood of being attacked by the dogs, horses, llamas, and donkeys you mention is statistically FAR FAR greater than the likelihood of being attacked by a dolphin anywhere in the world; and off Bimini there has NEVER been a dolphin attack. The very few dolphin attacks recorded (except for the two deaths, one of which was by the orca at Seaworld) resulted in nothing but minor lacerations: no serious injury. Dogs bites, however, kill people on a regular, if infrequent basis. Dog owners are notoriously deluded regarding the likelihood that their dog will bite a stranger. The risk is generally extremely low, but most owners of dogs who have bitten someone insist that their dog would never bite. Right up until it does. And then they blame the victim.

You even have the prices wrong: Wildquest charges $1,595 for a non-facilitated week ($100 more when there is a facilitator, who are crackpots and con artists who make supernatural claims about the dolphins, and should be avoided). The round-trip flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Bimini and back, plus one night at the Bahia Mar hotel on Sunday, due to the early morning flight out on Monday, are included in the price. There is an extra fee if you want a view of the bay or a single room. Wednesday's supper at a restaurant is not included, but you can pack extra food for lunch and set it aside if you don't want to go to the restaurant.

Dolphin Expeditions charges $1,457 and does not include the flight. They have a live-aboard boat, which means more time on the water (good or bad, depending on your susceptibility to seasickness) and much smaller living space, though every cabin has a shower and a head. Thus WQ is a bit cheaper. DE has two big, very friendly dogs that live on the boat, again good or bad depending on your feelings about dogs. The dogs live in the pilot house and so do not bother the guests. You can always visit the pilot house if you need to pet a dog or have your face licked.

Your information is wrong and your risk aversion is skewed by your apparent fear of dolphins. I would have no fear of approaching your animals, except maybe the chickens. But on an evidence-based risk assessment, being attacked by dolphins is a much lower risk than being bitten by a dog or kicked by a horse or donkey. I know pretty much nothing about llamas. I fed some llamas once, but they were on the other side of a chain-link fence. I pulled up some of the tall grass outside the fence for them.

Obvious common-sense rules apply: don't attempt to touch any wild animal, or come between mother and baby, and don't chase an animal that is moving away from you. In the case of the Bimini dolphins, all that will happen is that they'll swim away from you, but it is disappointing when that happens.