Oh, what a day! We spent the morning & early afternoon running errands and getting the house ready for John’s visit (Kathleen’s husband). Then Kel went to the dock shortly after 15:00 for the make-up dolphin trip with the tenth graders from the public school. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t go as planned because the seas were fairly rough. We did, however, take the students to snorkel at the Bimini Road (aka Atlantis).
Category: Bimini 2006
Video, video, video
So, we officially see spots when we close our eyes. Even though we’ve had a break from busy boat weeks, we’ve keep busy with other things, including logging video. For those of you who don’t know, while we are in the field, we spent our off-boat time identifying all of the dolphins in our video data. This involves playing the video back on the TV and writing down which dolphin is in view at every given moment on film. In theory, this is a fairly simple task.
Errands take so long!
Just a short note for today: Because we had a boat trip on Sunday, Monday’s trip was cancelled. Today (Tuesday) was spent running errands including an hour long trip to the bank. You see, the bank has been closed for the last 4 days; Friday was Bahamian Labor Day, Saturday & Sunday it’s always closed and Monday was “Whit Monday.” No one has been able to tell us what “Whit Monday” is exactly, but that longer-than-long long weekend meant everyone we’ve ever passed on the street was at the bank today.
A long day in the sun
So, despite our best efforts at reapplying sunblock, we are a bit toasty! We haven’t quite built up our tans, so the 11 hours we spent in the sun today left us with a shocking resemblance to boiled New England lobsters. Our morning brought us south of Bimini to go SCUBA diving. Aren’t our lives great? When we go to work, we’re free diving and on our days off, we’re SCUBA diving! They were beautiful dives…a drift dive and then a dive known for its reef sharks.
Oh, shocker, the schedule changed!
Well, just thought we’d let everyone know that there was no boat trip today. So, we spent the morning going through bottlenose photos and logging video. We officially have 4 bottlenose dolphins in our photo-ID catalog! It is very exciting for us and we should increase this as the summer progresses because we are getting a new camera!! Alaska Pacific University is sending us a digital still camera so that we can take photos of the bottlenose dorsal fins as they surface. We can’t wait!
A slow week
There were no dolphin trips so far this week, so we spent our time catching up with old friends, running errands and brainstorming ideas for the rest of the season. Today was a rainy day and we made it a bit of a “girl’s day” with Kathy. In the evening we went to see the speech component of the “Little Miss & Miss Native Fishing Tournament” a pageant in which the youngest daughter of the owners of Bimini Undersea is competing.
Dolphins & Darcie!
Oh, today was a good day. We had a good group of passengers and the boat was full. We saw and swam with a bottlenose group around 17:00 and then headed in search of spotteds. It wasn’t long before we found them. Two mother-calf pairs. One set was an unknown adult with a female calf. The other was un-named #57 and presumably her female calf. We are hopefully safely assuming this is her calf because of the close proximity of the two and the fact that last week we saw them together!
Where are all the dolphin watchers?
Well, we thought for sure that since it is Memorial Day weekend, there would be a boat trip…but, even though every slip on the island has a pretty boat in place, no one seemed to want to go on a dolphin trip. I don’t know why….don’t they know how much fun it is and how much I want to be collecting data!? Tonight we are having a small bonfire on the beach and then going to “Big John’s,” the new hangout.
No aquarium phone call
Ah, aquarium life. Ah, island life. Sometimes you have a plan for the day and sometimes none of that happens! Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration is getting ready to restart their dolphin program, which is set to include a phone link with us in Bimini. Today was meant to be the practice run, but it got postponed. And then it was a gloomy day here, so the dolphin trip was postponed as well. I tried to get a few odds & ends done and then staff, family &
Back at school
Our first visit to the public school on the island- Bimini All Ages – was this afternoon. As a reward for good academics, members of grade 10 are heading out to see the dolphins!
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