Dive #180 - Rich Torkington's Dive Log

This dolphin was photographed playing off the bow
of the boat, but our underwater encounter with them was
the highlight of this entire dive trip.
Photograph by Rob in Belize 2004

Dive Journal: This morning Bo and Ricky take us out to a site just a little west of the Elbow called Billy Bob. We start the dive as usual, heading down to 80’ to explore the deeper reef. We’re down there about 10 minutes when we hear Ricky gunning the Cool Dive around on the surface. He’s doing curly-q’s above us, and we see a pod of about 8 dolphins off the bow. We stop our exploration and gaze upward, enjoying the beautiful silhouetted view of the dolphins on the surface.

Bo swims out a bit into midwater about 50’. He rolls onto his back and hovers there. Pretty soon, to my amazement, five or six of the dolphins swim straight down at him from the surface, then arc away when they reach his depth! We all swim out into the blue, and I see two other dolphins approach and then swim closely parallel to another diver. I’m thinking, “Wow, what a great view that guy is getting,” and then I identify the fins as Linda’s! She must be freaking out!

We continue to vector out into midwater, and soon we can barely make out any features of the reef – we’re just floating in cobalt blue. To our delight, the dolphins stay with us and continue their antics. You can kinda tell they want to play, swim around with us and such, but they’re at least 50,000 times better swimmers than we are. As I’m watching them, three dolphins come really close by, and so I start swimming as hard as I can on a parallel course only 2 or 3 feet away. They seem to respond by staying with me as long as I fin, and this keeps up for a good minute or so. I get a great view of their faces and markings. Then, with one flick of their tails, they’re out of sight ahead of me.

We also notice that there is a very young one among them. Linda and Janel both get very close passes multiple times by the dolphins.

The dolphins finally move on, and that’s ok because we’ve spent almost all our air playing with them. Back on the boat, Linda proclaims this the best dive she’s ever experienced.