Dolphins, sharks, and submarines

I got home yesterday, one day late due to a missed connection. I swam with wild dolphins (wildquest.com), rode a one-man submarine (sub-bahamas.com), sailed on an America's Cup racer (sailnassau.com), swam with sharks (same outfit as the subs), and snorkeled in nice warm water.

For the dolphins, we spent six to seven hours a day on a catamaran, occasionally sailing, but more often motoring, not so much looking for dolphins, as waiting for them to come to us. When they did we waited a while to make sure they seemed interested, then a couple of people went in the water to see if they would stick around in the presence of swimmers, and then we all went in swimming with them. They interpret diving as play, so we dove down a lot, though there were some among us who stayed at the surface on floats. Typically, if I went down 5 or 6 feet and swam, one to three dolphins would come alongside and swim with me, so close I could have touched them (but didn't because we were asked not to) for as long as I could remain under. Out of the five days on the boat, we swam with dolphins twice, for half an hour or so, maybe longer; and once we got in the water to watch a pod of dolphins feeding at the bottom, but ignoring us. The rest of the time we cruised around, snorkeled at different reefs, combed a deserted beach, or jumped off the boat into the water. I was seasick some of the time, but not severely, or for terribly long, so the scopolamine did its job pretty well.

The shark swim was the last activity in a half-day of reef snorkeling with the same outfit that runs the subs. They lowered a bait cage to a depth of 50 feet, and then we got in the water and watched the sharks so far below us that they were mere shadows. Soon, however, they started to come back towards the surface, and when they appeared to be maybe 10 feet down we all panicked and scrambled back onto the boat. So it wasn't so much swimming "with" sharks, as swimming above sharks. Yes, it felt like a crazy thing to do, but they told us that none of their clients has ever been bitten. And we were only in the water with the sharks for about ten minutes. Once we were all safely on board the boat again, they pulled up the bait cage and gave the sharks the food, resulting in a wild maelstrom of dorsal fins.

Fear is not a rational emotion, and seeing sharks (big ones, six or seven feet long!) coming up towards us all too quickly, was not actually the scariest thing I did. The scariest thing was jumping off the deck of the dolphin boat into the water. I am terrified of heights.

I'll now try to post some of the pictures from the dolphin experience.

The island of Bimini, The Bahamas:
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Getting off the plane in Bimini:
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Wildquest:
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I'm going to keep these posts short. More pics to follow immediately.

Me:
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Dolphins:
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The number of devastatingly beautiful women on this trip was amazing, and for the most part they went around in very scanty bikinis.
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It looks like PC is going to join these posts together, in spite of my effort to keep the posts shorter.

More dolphins:
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More dolphins:
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Us swimming with the dolphins. I'm wearing the black swim cap (otherwise the top of my head gets sunburned) and the yellow swim fins:
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That's all for right now. I have to go out. I will post more pictures later.

 

Costs for the activities are on the web sites. Wildquest charges from $1,500 to $1,700 for a 5-day "week" based on double occupancy. Air fare depends on where you start out. Any travel site can give you fares.

I, too, said I was not going to get in the water with sharks. And nobody had to. It was only about ten minutes, after snorkeling at two other places. But then when the time came, I knew that if I didn't get in the water I'd regret it afterwards. And the plain fact is that driving to the airport was far more dangerous than getting in the water with sharks when the captain knows what species they are: 97% of shark species never attack humans.

(And to clarify, swimming with sharks was not on the dolphin trip. I have no pictures of the shark swim. But we did see a shark or two on the bottom when we were swimming with dolphins. But those stayed on the bottom.)

That's me, with the number 55 fins:
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Cruising in calm seas, and taking a snooze:
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In rougher seas you can sit on the bow and get drenched when the boat hits the waves just right:
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Snorkeling on a reef:
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Reef again:
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This was the scariest thing I did my whole time in the Bahamas. I am terrified of heights:
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The scenery was breathtaking:
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The whole gang from my week at Wildquest:
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WildQuest has a video on YouTube here. This video was not made the week I was there, so I didn't meet any of the people in it, and I am not in it. I did get a DVD with video that includes me, but it's much too big to post here. I have not even watched it all the way through, as I find it rather tedious.

I don't know for sure about the coral. I know coral is having problems all over the world due to changes in water temperature. But corals come in all different colors, including white, so I have no reason to think that the corals in these pictures are especially bleached.

All in all this was a great trip, and I recommend it to anyone who likes the water and shares my fascination with dolphins. I had fun on Paradise island, at the resort (just across from Nassau) but the place I expect to return to is WildQuest, on Bimini, not the resort on Paradise Island.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(vtie @ Oct 2 2007, 12:58 AM) [snapback]520183[/snapback]</div>

I agree that feeding should be prohibited. As I think I mentioned earlier, I felt that the shark feeding was done in an irresponsible manner, and I did not believe the operator's claim that the sharks did not eat the fishes attracted to the fish food. I do believe that the risk to us was minimal, but I think the relevant point was made in the article: that feeding changes animals' behavior. It has long been understood that feeding of bears is the principal cause of attacks by bears on people, and there's no reason to think that sharks are different in this respect.

But where there's money to be made, the worst of human characteristics will come out. I expect shark-feeding to continue until there's a high-profile multiple death.

I did not know, when I went on that half-day trip, that we would be swimming with sharks, or that they would feed them. It was simply billed as a half-day snorkeling trip, and the principal activity was snorkeling. Perhaps I should have refused to participate in the shark swim, but, hey, I'm not that principled.

WildQuest, where I swam with dolphins, does not feed the dolphins. And the dolphins did not display any of the sort of aggressiveness that I would expect of animals conditioned to expect food from people. Throughout history dolphins have shown curiosity towards ships and swimming humans, and this was the behavior I observed, as they swam among us, often just inches away from us, without ever seeming to expect food.

 

Now I'm trying to decide where to go for a winter get-away in December or January. There's also a trip to Machu Picchu in April. But I'm not sure how I'd react to the altitude. I guess they give you cocoa-leaf tea (the precursor of cocaine) but I don't like stimulants other than caffeine, and even that I don't handle well at all.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SSimon @ Oct 3 2007, 06:25 AM) [snapback]520537[/snapback]</div>

I went to new Zealand and Australia the winter before last. I have no pictures. This summer was the first time I had a camera small enough to justify the nuisance of carrying. I expect to return to NZ. It is a wonderful country, and maybe (?) the only country with the guts to tell the U.S. to F off when the U.S. tried to bully them into allowing nuclear-armed ships into their harbors. But it's a long, uncomfortable flight, even in business class.

 

I'd love to go to the Galapagos. But my seasickness makes that impossible. In fairly calm waters scopolamine reduces it to a tolerable level. But in rougher seas, even scopolamine is not enough, and I get deathly sick. Antarctica presents the same problem, but since I don't care for cold weather, it's never been high on my wish list.