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Published: December 12th 2023
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I'm just back home, and as usual, I'm running late on my blogging. This one is a little special and I admit I went a little overboard with the amount of pictures posted.
I booked this trip months ago. The program is pretty simple, a week on the MV Dolphin Dream, leaving out of West Palm Beach in Florida heading to the Bahamas. We are stopping in two places. First is the world famous Tiger Beach. There is no actual beach around here, we are some three hours at sea away from West End's in Grand Bahama. We will spend there a total of 3 days. Next, we are heading South to the small Island of Bimini to do to days of diving on a place call Hammerhead Inlet. Out of the 7 days, we will never set foot on land, so forget about the beautiful beaches and local food!
The dolphin Dream is actually my 20th boat when it comes to liveaboard. Only 4 staff members for a total of 12 guests. This is a solid boat, but it's definitively one of the less luxury one I experienced. The cabin is super small...and feel like a freezer, so
I ended spending the all week sleeping upstairs in the lounge! Beside the freezing cabin, it was still a pretty enjoyable and comfortable experience, and I can confirm we were very well fed by the great cook!
Only 12 guests! This could be a very tricky mix. I have booked with Eli of SDM, based in Texas. First trip for me with them, so not really sure what to expect. Well, it turned pretty well. He had few repeated guests. The mix was a pretty diverse Americans with a majority of Europeans, all travelling as singles. Fun fact, four of the divers actually live in South Florida and drove to the boat! Half of the divers are travelling with huge camera toys. The kinds of one you could buy a small second-hand car for the price of the heavy toys! Sure those give amazing pictures, but I'm not ready to put anytime soon 10,000usd ++ in a camera! To top it off, that's way to heavy for me to log around!
The first question most non-shark divers are asking about such a trip is....Is it dangerous?!? Well...not easy to reply to this. The real
answer is it is not dangerous if things are done properly. Having my own reef as one of the top 10 shark sites on the planet, I name Protea Banks, I believe I know a little more than your average shark diver.
So is it dangerous? five day before our trip, a 47 years old German lady had a fatal accident while at Tiger Beach. yes there is a reason why you sign the waiver. I have my clear idea of what did happen, but I'm not going to go into this here. What is real, is that we had no proper feeding of Tiger sharks while staying and diving on Tiger beach.
it is interesting to note that if diving on Protea Banks, I prefer 10x a reef dive than a baited dive. Pictures are more impressive for sure on baited, but the natural connection to sharks is way more fun for me without the bait. So for Tiger beach, no feeding meant I could enjoy the reef more freely with still tons of interaction with tiger sharks, lemon sharks, Bahamas reef sharks as well as nurse sharks and few other cool underwater sea life!
I hope you will enjoy the picture.
Sadly for us, there was a lot of current on Tiger Beach, so we could only do one dive the first day, 3 dives the next day and 2 dives the final day here. It did result also in pretty milky water. This is not great for the picture, but the interaction with the shark is actually much more fun and yes...close to them. On one dive we had only 3 tiger sharks, but we went up to 8 or 9 of them on one of the best one!
Next, just out of Bimini, 2 days of diving Hammerhead Inlet. Here it's pure feeding. They have a known population of 5 great hammerhead sharks. We saw up to 4 of them at the same time. There are also numerous nurse sharks playing around big time. We had on one dive the visit of a smaller tiger shark, plus a single bull shark passing in the outer layer of visibility. Two days here for us, feeding start around 11am....and goes non-stop till 4-5pm. It's pretty shallow at 12 meters, so you decide when you go in and out
of the water...I did each day 3 dives, 200 minutes each time in the water.
Would I do this everyday, for sure not, it would very fast become way too repetitive. But two days was a lot of fun! So for my second visit of the Bahamas in 2023, I can claim that I finally dived withe the big locals! Hope you enjoy the pictures, and I still have two more blogs about this trip ahead of me.
Enjoy your end of the year travelling...and stay safe!
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