Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Diving with Annie the Dolphin, Curacao, Netherlands Antilles
Well my ear is well and truly buggered, but I will be buggered if I am going to pass on a dive with a dolphin. So I brave the stinging salt water that runs into my throat while I pass the 10 meter mark. The dive is not much deeper and a perforation of the eardrum does not actually suffer from the dive, because there is no imbalance of the pressure. Anyway I am sure it is not recommended, but so far... 10 days later when I write this I have no earpain.
The instructions from Gearge the Dolphin trainer of the Dolphin Academy are clear: let her Annie, the dolphin come to you, and don't start reaching out right away. If you stick to that, she will hang around.
And hanging around she did. For a full 30 minutes she races over the reef like a dog of his leash, to come back to us and play for a while. Soon Annie becomes cuddely with most of the divers, interacting with most of us.
I can immagine how much swimming with a dolphin must mean for autistic children, because by the time I surface I almost feel sane again :-). Although Anne Marie of Habitat seems to think I should go for 2 more sessions , to even come close to sanity.
Even though Annie was captured in the wild in Central America, she was trained in a record 6 weeks and goes out to open sea regularly, without wanting to disappear. Dolphins are very intelligent underwater mammals, so I guess if she wanted to get away, she would have done it a long time ago. In the meantime she has convinced me that she is having a good time playing around with landbased mammals of a dive. After diving with an Elephant this is the next best thing I have experiences and I am glad that I decided to withstand the ear trauma.
Annie comes to Jillian for a cuddle
The instructions from Gearge the Dolphin trainer of the Dolphin Academy are clear: let her Annie, the dolphin come to you, and don't start reaching out right away. If you stick to that, she will hang around.
And hanging around she did. For a full 30 minutes she races over the reef like a dog of his leash, to come back to us and play for a while. Soon Annie becomes cuddely with most of the divers, interacting with most of us.
I can immagine how much swimming with a dolphin must mean for autistic children, because by the time I surface I almost feel sane again :-). Although Anne Marie of Habitat seems to think I should go for 2 more sessions , to even come close to sanity.
Even though Annie was captured in the wild in Central America, she was trained in a record 6 weeks and goes out to open sea regularly, without wanting to disappear. Dolphins are very intelligent underwater mammals, so I guess if she wanted to get away, she would have done it a long time ago. In the meantime she has convinced me that she is having a good time playing around with landbased mammals of a dive. After diving with an Elephant this is the next best thing I have experiences and I am glad that I decided to withstand the ear trauma.
Annie comes to Jillian for a cuddle
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