SCUBA DIVING: Dolphin swim sealed with a kiss

BY BILL BLEYER | Newsday Staff Writer

January 22, 2006

In more than two decades of scuba diving, I've penetrated shipwrecks and hung in a cage while blue and mako sharks circled and grabbed chunks of bait. But none of that seemed as surreal as when I was kneeling on the sand in 35 feet of water off Grand Bahama Island earlier this winter, removed my regulator on cue and then watched as an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin closed in and planted a kiss on my lips.

This was not a hallucination caused by nitrogen narcosis. This was a "Dolphin Dive" organized by UNEXSO, the oldest dive operator on the island best known for its main city, Freeport.

For $159, certified divers can pet, be spun around by, kiss and swim around a reef with a pair of relatively tame dolphins. It's sort of like going to a SeaWorld show, except you're underwater and part of the cast.

There are a lot of vacation destinations where you can interact with dolphins by swimming or snorkeling in a pool, lagoon or open water. But there are only a handful of places where you can actually scuba dive with them. And being submerged for a long period provides a lot better opportunity for observing and interacting.

"We've been doing it since the late 1980s," said Niall Christoffersen, the operations manager at UNEXSO. The idea is to combine education and entertainment.

Besides operating a full-service dive center, UNEXSO operates a habitat and training facility for dolphins. When you sign up for the open water dolphin encounter, a dive boat takes you from the shop in Lucaya down the coast to the dolphin center, where you meet two of the eight trainers who will join you on the reef.

Preparing for the dive

Veronica Cuccurullo, a native of Grand Bahama who has been training the dolphins for a decade, and Tristin Pratt, another island native, were our guides. While group sizes are limited by all of the dolphin dive operators, I lucked out on a pre-peak-season dive because there were only two other divers.

Standing on the dock while dolphins squeaked and splashed in their pens nearby, Cuccurullo said we'd be diving with Kaholo, which means quick in Hawaiian, and Cacique, which means chief in Arawak, the native language of the Caribbean.

There are 17 dolphins at the center, ranging from a 17-month-old up to dolphins in their 30s. Eleven were born at the facility and the others came from aquariums. UNEXSO no longer captures wild dolphins. The dolphins at the facility are separated during the day in 14 pens. "At the end of the training day, they mix together," Cuccurullo said.

She advised us to get in position quickly, because if we took too long to get in the water and form a triangle on the bottom, the dolphins might get bored and swim back to their pens, snacks or no snacks.

We were shown a set of hand signals to use when we were cued by the trainers. Extending a hand with palm facing out invited the dolphins to come to you to be petted. Extending an arm rigidly out to your side while rising several feet off the bottom would bring the dolphins in for a "rostrum push": They push on your hand with their elongated rostrum, or beak, to spin you around rapidly several times. "You'll get to feel their power," Cuccurullo said. "They are very strong."

And removing the scuba regulator from your mouth brought the dolphins in for a kiss - or at least touching your lips to theirs. "Everyone gets a kiss," she promised.

We were advised not to touch the dolphins' heads because they don't like that.

"At the end of the dive, they will give you a wave goodbye," the trainer said.

The dolphins are free to swim away into the ocean once they leave their pen if they choose. But Cuccurullo said they are unlikely to do that because they know they have a good deal: They get plenty of food and they're protected from predators like sharks circling on the reef. "Sharks are their No. 1 predator," she said. In a tense situation, they won't run away. "They run home" to the pens.

Leathery skin, cold lips

With that, we headed out to the reef 10 minutes away. We watched from the dive boat as the dolphins swam alongside the trainers' skiff and launched themselves in the air for fish snacks.

We donned our scuba gear as the boat tied up to a buoy, splashed into the 78-degree water and floated down to the sand where the trainers positioned us as Kaholo and Cacique cavorted around us.

We took turns petting the dolphins, whose skin felt like soft leather marked by scrapes and cuts from predators or the reef. We were spun in a dizzying cyclone of exhaust bubbles and then got kissed by each dolphin in turn. It felt like a cold, quick, wet peck.