Dolphin Surprise

"What do we do for the next three days?" I asked the wife. We were at the reception desk of the Bohol Beach Club and apart from the 1/2 day tour (highly recommended I might add) there was nothing to do except burn ourselves on the beach, eat, drink and be merry. Not a bad plan actually but I could see myself going nuts after a day.

"Sir, maybe you want to go dolphin watching" said the receptionist. Dolphin watching? In Bohol? Don't get me wrong, I love dolphins but I never knew Bohol was a Dolphin watching location. It was probably going to be one of those expensive resort tours where you sight a dolphin a mile a way for a millisecond. Still, we had nothing better to do and so we decided to go for it.

We were up at the crack of dawn, met our boatman and headed off. Sure enough, when asking about the prospects of seeing dolphins the guy was already prepared with his disclaimer - It was a hit or miss situation, you should come during peak season, etc. etc.

After a while, the spotter shouted a sighting to our left. By the time I had looked in the direction the dolphin was gone. So this is how it was going to be, we'd go around a couple of hours, someone points in a direction where my wife and I aren't looking . . . . .

After a while though even my wife got into the act, what was this, a conspiracy? Finally I got to see one for myself, of in the distance, breaching the water but so far away it was the size of my fingernail. I take out my point and shoot camera and caught it in a shot but it may as well have been one of those blurred out UFO photos where the object could be anything.

Resigned to this being a bust I settle in and looked into the water closer to the boat, can't they come any closer? I once saw them at the bow of a ferry I was riding, so ecstatic was I that I wanted to jump into the water with them. Of course the ferry was about two storeys high and would run over me so that wasn't such a good idea. Now however, looking into the waters of Bohol I saw a distinct figure shadowing our boat not 4 meters away. Before long, another sleek figure came alongside and then moved to the bow. After a while a whole pod came to our boat and I was thrilled. The boatman told us to lie on the bow of the boat to get a better view and what a view it was. The dolphins couldn't have been more that 4 feet away, sometimes turning to their side so that they could have a better look at us, a case of mutual people/dolphin watching.

They stayed with us, sometimes breaching and spinning, sometimes leaving only to join us again later. The boatman also saw a pod of 30-40 pilot whales but didn't go near them as they aren't as sociable as the dolphins ie they bump the boat a lot.

In any case, that was my closest encounter with dolphins so far. I didn't jump in, it wasn't allowed but I hope we'll be able to swim with dolphins in the wild sometime in the future.