And we’re a little sad…
Today marked the 41st trip of the season and the start of our last dolphin week of 2005. We have a great group of 5 passengers, who will be with us each day through Thursday. On today’s trip, we also had an additional 6 passengers who were just along for the day.
We started out at 13:30 for the Meet and Greet. After passengers went to their rooms, we departed the dock shortly after 15:00. We began at Rainbow Reef before heading to the dolphin grounds. We sighted 2 bottlenose dolphins at 16:45, but they only stayed around for 4 minutes, below the surface much of the time. We considered this the warm up for the spotteds, which we found at 17:24. We were with the dolphins, on and off, until 19:02, so it was a good day by our standards! We had 2 water entries and were able to ID the following animals: #01, 04 (Buster), 10 (Romeo), 14 (Tina), 22 (Split Jaw), 25, 35 (Lil’ Jess), 36 (Swoosh), 38 (Cerra), 56 (Lone Star), 82 and possibly #15 (Freckles), 69 and 78. We also saw a female calf with a well healed scar on his peduncle.
We saw some leaping, bow and wake riding, as well as some mating among a group of adults and a group of juveniles and subadults. The group of spotteds was large and extremely scattered, but we enjoyed watching them from the boat and the under the surface.
Another trip tomorrow!!
Until then,
Kel and Darcie