Chuck & Nancy

My last post described the incredible experience we had with Adam swimming with the spinner dolphins in Hawaii. I tried to describe the excitement and magical quality of this experience. A very nice young man named Bill had an underwater digital camera with him. He got some terrific photos of the dolphins which will give you a glimse of just how surrounded and delightful it was. I am so grateful to Bill for sharing these photos. I gave him my email address and I was just delighted today to receive these wonderful underwater photos.
Note you can enlarge any picture here by clicking on it.
Our “encounter” started with some of them swimming toward us as if they were curious. The adults are 5 to 7 feet long and weigh 150 - 200 lbs.
They seem to like to swim in pairs almost like they are drafting each other. The rest of the group is not far away. These are below. Note how clear the water is and how smooth and white the sand is. The water was about 15 to 20 feet deep I think.

Look at the light playing on the dolphins .. they are probably about 8 feet away in this photo and are near the surface.

Here you can see some breathing. The reason you can swim with them during the mid day is that it is their resting time of the day. They feed at night, then they are active and “spinning” in the morning where they jump and spin out of the water. In the middle of the day they find a clear place to cluster together and just “cruise” in a tight group at a very leisurely pace.

This gives you an idea of how densely they were clustered together swimming below us. This photo shows over 20 dolphin and it is a small fraction of what we were looking at. They were all around us. I’d estimate 60 to 100 dolphin in the pod.

This photo has over 25 dolphin and if you look very closely in the bottom right corner there is a baby below it’s mother. The water was probably 15 to 20 feet deep and we swam around in the bay with them for 20 or 30 minutes. It was a truly magical experience.