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Published: February 20th 2010
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About a month before my family came to cruise with me, I’d emailed them options for what we could do in the ports of call. The one thing my cousin Kelsey had to do was swim with dolphins. I’d never done this before, though it’s been offered on most ships I’ve worked on. Crew rarely get passes to do this tour and I’d never wanted to do it badly enough to spend the money on it. But I still had some money left over from Christmas presents, which I’d been told was to use on excursions from the ship, so it seemed like the time for me to swim with the dolphins as well.
It was an early morning for me and I sure looked and felt rough when I met the family. We took the tender boat ashore into Zihautanejo and met up with the rest of the tour group. We boarded a bus which took us to the next bay over, Ixtapa. Ixtapa is lined with big hotels, resorts, condos and shopping and in the row of these things along the water is the Dolphinarium.
The dolphins were swimming around the pool when we arrived. Uncle Allan
and Aunt Renee had pool-side seats to watch the action. We were given life jackets and then split into three different groups, each on a different side of the pool. Then we were in the water.
One thing I’d always been skeptical about with this tour, was that I always assumed you’d pay a lot of money and only have a few brief moments to actually interact with the dolphins. But I was really impressed with how many people they had on the tour, yet we all felt we had a great experience.
The trainer with our group stood at the edge of the pool and answered questions we had about the dolphins. While we talked, a lovely 17 year old dolphin named Choco swam amongst our group. We could pet him as he swam by. At one point his back fin slapped my leg as he swam past - wow was he strong!
One by one, we then each had a turn with Choco and someone from the centre took photos (of course for sale after). Kelsey went before me. She was so cute, grinning away! Then I got to go up and hold Choco’s fins
so it looked like we were dancing. That photo was the complimentary one I received and it’s hanging up in my cabin now. Then I gave him a hug and a kiss and we both smiled for the camera.
Then Choco’s daughter, Mia, came out to play with us too. Mia is 7 years old - “just a baby” according to the trainer. Mia gave me a belly ride. She swam on her back and I held onto each of her side fins and pulled me across the length of the pool.
We spent some more time treading water while Mia and Choco swam around us and our trainer talked. He would have the dolphins make noises that seemed to be responses to the things he was saying. We had some good laughs.
The final interaction we had was the nose push. For this, you float on your stomach with your legs straight out behind you. Then two dolphins will swim up behind and each will push their nose against your foot and push you across the pool. I thought you’d just sort of push along in the position you were in. Then the first woman went
and to my complete surprise, when the dolphins pushed her, she came right out of the water and across it like she was water skiing! There’s a great pic here of Kelsey “skiing” across the pool. I felt one of the dolphins move almost as soon as I got up out of the water and I twisted around and fell quite quickly, so no photo of me doing this trick.
After all the swimming, we sat at the edge of the pool and the dolphins did different tricks for us. The greatest impression of them that I came away with is how incredibly strong dolphins are. They always just seem so cute and sweet and compared to other sea creatures like whales and sharks, they’re so small. Their bodies’ strength astounded me. They were pushing and pulling around some really big people with complete ease. And every time I touched one of them, I could just feel their strength. Awesome.
When the tour was finished and we had our souvenir photos, we were driven back to the pier. We still had a lot of time before we had to be back on board, so we wandered around Zihautanejo.
We walked down to the water to take some pictures, but didn’t stay long because the sand was so incredibly hot on our feet! We looked through the shops and market stalls for some souvenirs. We sat in a beach side restaurant and had a lunch and some drinks. We decided we could definitely stay there longer.
One more port day to go. The cruise is going by too quickly!
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