Manon and I have come to enjoy spending the first day of the new year on Roatan at Anthony’s Key Resort (AKR) and the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS). The MIA airport was not as busy as we’d expected but we had a lovely view of an AA plane waiting to board our flight. (You can tell it was early!)
We arrived earlier than usual to Roatan and had lunch on arrival to AKR! From there, we dropped our bags at our room, said hi to several friends/staff members, headed to RIMS to pick up gear, and detoured to Bailey’s Key to greet the trainers and the dolphins! Elli and her calf greeted us (or so it felt – see feature photo) when we visited to check out any new rakes or other markings on all the dolphins at Bailey’s. This is helpful before our first entry for data collection on each visit because we’ll then know the new and temporary markings for reliable ID confirmation.
After getting not quite our fill of dolphins, we returned to our room and unpacked a bit and put gear together for tomorrow morning’s first data collection session. We’ll go over between 6:30 and 6:45 AM to confirm daylight and light for underwater visibility. Sunrise is about 6:15 AM … so we should be ok. Here’s hoping the conditions are favorable! The afternoon conditions continued with thick clouds and windy conditions. You can see the swell with rolling breakers on the north side of Anthony’s Key … but the rain has subsided!
Our first group, from Colorado State University (CSU) arrives on Saturday. The University of Rhode Island (URI) group comes a week later. It will be two packed weeks! Stay tuned to this blog to follow along with our data collection and dolphin observations!
Cheers
Kathleen & Manon