Dolphins safe or not?

[LowFin]

During our annual summer vacation along the North Carolina beaches, we often see pods of bottlenose dolphins swim by, mostly chasing bait or cruising up and down the sandbars. I have seen folks swim or kayak out to them.

• Has anyone ever snorkeled or SCUBA'ed with wild dolphins (any species and untrained, not the Discovery Cove variety) on purpose (no pun intended) or by accident?
• If so have you ever had a problem or was it a completely safe experience?

I cannot imagine that they are as friendly as they are made out to be. After all they are large wild animals. And if you consider their size, swimming speed, intelligence and amount of teeth I would bet someone may have had an incident. If not, perhaps I will join these crazy people this year.

 

[Thalassamania]

I snorkel, almost daily, in an area that is frequented by Hawaiian Spinners. I see them better than half the time, often as close as arms length, I never felt any discomfort or perceived and aggressive action, even adults with young will come up quite close.

 

[OldNSalty]

I had a school come up on me during a dive - one of the best dives of my life. They would swim up and make a clicking sound at us-always staying just out of arms reach. As far as I could tell, they just wanted to check out what funny looking animals we were. After about 20 minutes they got tired of us and moved on but we were never in any danger.

 

[redacted]

I swam out from a NJ beach once into what I thought was a pod of dolphins. What I ended up in the middle of turned out to be the better part of 12 to 15 foot long animals that I believe were pilot whales. They turned out to be OK (seemed to totally ignore me) but I don't think I would want to do that again. So you might want to look for the pointy noses first.

 

[Damselfish]

I feel fortunate to have had one UW encounter with a small group of dolphins in southern Belize. We all just hung near each other in the water checking each other out then all too soon they were on their way. Definitely no sign of hostility.

 

[ptyx]

Years ago.

A dive boat in Bonaire (Klein), moored. Divers gear up and get ready, a pod of dolphins arrives and plays nearby. Everyone gets excited. A couple divers get in the water, as quietly as possible (relatively speaking - still a giant jump). Dolphins are still doing their dolphin things about 50 feet from the boat (yeah!).

Then the next group jumps in, starts crawling to the pod as fast (and noisily) as possible. Efforts by others to calm them down have no success - as they're doing too much shouting and trashing water to hear anything.

One of the big dolphins in the pod didn't like it. He did a very impressive mock charge, turning away about 4 feet from the troublesome diver. Now THAT stopped him and his friends right there - actually, the 'target' was still white after going back to the boat. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the pod decided to leave after that. Can't blame them. There is no doubt in my mind that had it been a real charge, the diver would be either dead or crippled.

Lessons learned:

• dolphins are intelligent enough (and patient enough) to threaten rather than hurt when confronted with obnoxious behavior
• there must be something to the mock charges in mammals as the behavior is shared between completely different species (dolphins, lions, elephants...)

I'd love to have another chance at diving with dolphins, but it's more up to them than up to me. I wouldn't be worried about aggressiveness - I'm neither food nor a threat, and they can leave anytime if they don't like me.

 

[SeaHound]

I had this dolphin encounter while diving near Dry Tortugas on a liveaboard called Ultimate Getaways. These dolphins seemed to have a very friendly persona. I dont know how to describe it but they swam very close and went a few feet under my safety stop, enabling me to take this picture. It was one of my greatest "diving moments."

From what I have observed, they seem to love people and they can sense when they get your attention. These are not shy fish and they would often come across as "posers" or "actors." There was a time when I was on a boat in Karachi Pakistan and we started chasing dolphins who were swimming ahead of the boat. When we anchored the boat, they would jump out of the water a good 10 feet in the air spin and then splash! These were wild untrained dolphins but they seemed to love attention.

I look forward to meeting them again

 

[TSandM]

We dropped off the boat into a pod of dolphins in Rangiroa. They stayed with us for about five minutes (according to my computer!) making passes by us and doing rolls and spins. It was five of the best minutes I've spent underwater -- absolutely breathtaking.

We also ended up swimming with about 25 to 30 of them in the Red Sea. We weren't in gear, dabnabit, but we surface swam, and some people were able to free dive down to where they were. (I can't get underwater in a swimsuit, let alone in a drysuit with no weights.)

Mostly they ignored us, but a couple of the younger ones seemed curious. No aggression exhibited by anybody.

 

[H2O 70]

I had a near dolphin experience off the OBX a few years ago. My buddy and I would watch this pair of dolphins cruise by every morning. One morning we hoped in the kayaks and went out. Sure enough the pair started to head our way. Off we went. It was a mother and her calf. The vis was crap, 3ft maybe. On the surface we could see the pair swimming straight at us. About 10-15ft away, the went under. We dropped as well. We could hear them as plain as day. Never saw them though. We popped back up and they were swimming all around us. They did this for about 15 minutes and then continued South.

A few months later down in the Keys, my buddy had a few experiences with wild dolphins. He found that they really hung around while doing breath hold. The noise of SCUBA drove them away. He got some good video.

I would say like any wildlife, you've got to be mindful, but in general I wouldn't worry about dolphins at all. I'd consider it a joyful and rare experience.

 

[Thalassamania]

...I would say like any wildlife, you've got to be mindful, but in general I wouldn't worry about dolphins at all. I'd consider it a joyful and rare experience.

Come here to the Big Island, it's an every-other-day thing, and you don't even have to break the rules, they come to you.