Delfines Dulces

I splurged.  After my bioluminescent journey, I wanted to spend more time on the water today, and I especially wanted to snorkel and see dolphins, so I bought my way onto a boat tour of the gulf.  The boat is owned and captained by John, the guy who owns Cabinas Jimenez where I'm staying.  It turned out to be money well-spent, worth every penny of the $60 cost, and more, considering the marvels I saw.

We left at 8:30 this morning on a receding tide.  There were 9 of us:  John, Sam (his Hawaiian sidekick/dolphin spotter), Oso (his bow-riding, dolphin-spotting dog), me, and a group of 4 brothers and the girlfriend of one of the brothers.  They were an interesting family:  all four in their mid-to-late 20's, slim, good-looking professionals (doctor, lawyer, jazz musician, Sierra Club director).  It was great company for a four-hour journey.

The Golfo Dulce is approximately 35 miles long by 10 miles wide, and is fed by many clear local rivers, hence the name, "The Sweet Gulf".  We sped first around a small cape and back into a mangrove lagoon before the tide was completely out, spotting a couple of what I believe to be bare-throated tiger herons.  After exiting the lagoon, we spent the next half-hour to 45 min. cruising around the gulf to various places that were known to have dolphins, 9 pairs of eyes constantly searching the water for signs of the dark, arcing fins.  John was amazingly patient with his explanations of all of our non-dolphin exclamatory sightings:  floating trees, limbs, brush, coconuts, sardines balled together to escape predators, jack tuna.

Finally, he took us to a small, older coral reef off the opposite coast which hosts a large national park.  There he busted out the plane boards, an unforgettable experience that I had completely misassumed would be something like wakeboarding.  Instead it was to snorkeling what bicycling is to walking....just a slightly faster way of seeing the same thing without as much work.  The plane board was similar to a large, varathaned cutting board with handholds cut near the top and the bottom and a 30' rope attached at the top end. We jumped into the water with a mask on, grabbed the plane board with both hands and John idled us along about 3-5 miles per hour.  When ready, I angled the nose of the board downward, and it took me underwater among the tropical fish and coral.  When I wanted a breath, I angled it back up to the top, gulped some air, and immediately angled back down again.  I was able to angle to the side to explore, angle more steeply to go deeper (12' was the deepest that I went), and level off underwater at whatever depth that I wanted, including going up and over any coral extrusions I wanted to avoid.  Too soon, my turn was over and each of the others jumped in for the experience.

After a quick snack of fresh melons, mangoes, pineapples, and granola bars, we all jumped in to snorkel on our own.  Parrot fish, angelfish, sturgeonfish, dorados, sergeant-majors, et al, glided, darted, and schooled for us until one by one we surfaced and climbed aboard John's boat.

The search for dolphins continued, but John looks for everything that he can find of interest, so we stopped along the coastline to observe a troop of capuchin monkeys, white-faced and curious.  He did a 180 for a caracara that landed nearby and kept making short excursions each time we approached, finally affording us several close-up photos.  But no dolphins.  We scoured all of the known spots along the opposite side and started heading back to Jimenez.  There were two high spotting chairs located on the front rails right and left.  I took one and Dan, one of the brothers, took the other.  We saw rays and sardines and tuna, but no dolphins.  We switched out so that Paul and Tim could take the chairs.  Then Nicole and Mark.  Then I returned with Dan.  He spotted them first.

 It was a small pod of 8-12 bottlenose dolphins.  When we came up on them, I thought that we were going to run over one.  He must have been curious because he slowed his pace so that the boat was overtaking him on his exact course, waited until he was right under the bow, slipped just slightly over to my side of the bow, and turned his head sideways just underwater so that he could look up at me sitting in that chair while effortlessly keeping pace.  Then they were all around us: surfacing, arcing, blowing, diving, slapping the water with their tails, sliding across beneath the boat, playing with an errant palmetto leaf.....just hanging out with us, letting us observe for a while, going under for a while, coming back up and playing.  All this within a mile and a half of the town pier where we had started.  John hung out there with them for 20-30 minutes, letting us get our fill, or so he thought.  Or not.  I'm sure that somewhere deep inside he realized that we could have stayed out there all day and night, beginning again the next morning, and never tired of it.