Do You Want to See Dolphins???

We had a wonderful day playing "tourist", AND I finally got some decent pictures of dolphins!!!

But, first, a few more comments about Friday's crossing. I forgot to mention that I spotted a very large sea turtle, near the surface, right next to the boat while I was driving, about 30 miles south of Dog island. 

This turtle looks like the one I saw.

We saw fewer crab traps off Tarpon Springs than we had seen in our last two trips. We had hoped that coming in on more of a 90 degree angle from the deeper water would produce those results…and it seemed to have worked. The traps were strung north to south, and even when it was getting towards dusk, we could easily see them ahead of time using the binoculars, and the spotlight was charged and ready! The channel markers with flashing red and green lights, combined with our GPS, were easy to follow. Our biggest concern were the crab traps…Happiness is having the Captain have "new" eyes thanks to his cataract surgery last year!

This morning we walked about a mile to the mainland to visit the Clearwater Marine Aquarium and arrived at 8:55, five minutes before it opened, and there were only four people ahead of us. Sometimes they have 3-4 thousand people in a day…but today, lucky for us, they only had about a hundred by noon. Of course, the main attraction is Winter, the dolphin rescued in Dec. 2005 near Cape Canaveral, after getting her tail caught in the ropes of, of all things, a crab trap!!! Life would be a lot easier if crab tasted yucky!!! But it was very fortunate for the Clearwater Marine Aquarium! The resulting movie, Dolphin Tale, with its tremendous publicity, has turned them into a #1 tourist attraction, and they are raising money for expansion. This sign shows their main mission!

This is Winter without her prothesis. She not only lost her flukes, but she lost her bottom two vertebrae. Her spine is abnormally curved, causing extra muscles to form on the sides of her "peduncle", the part where the flukes would attach. She wears her special tail as part of physio-therapy to counteract the muscle build-up caused by her swimming sideways, like a fish. It is hard work, and she didn't have it on when we were there. Just like us...she doesn't do physio 24/7.

This is a "picture of a picture" so you can see how the prothesis fits. The company that designed it also developed a brand new kind of material that is very soft and stretchy, yet grips firmly. This "gel" not only helps the "fake fluke" feel good to Winter, but it is now being used to help humans!!!

 Winter was only a few months old when rescued. She is still growing, and molds of her peduncle are taken every 6 months to see if she needs a "new tail."(Sorry about Don's thumb at the top.)

 You might remember Rufus from the movie, the white pelican, another animal I have been trying to photograph!!! Rufus was actually played by two different birds, Lucy and Ricky! They do their "tricks" as reliably as a dog does its tricks!

Hope loves chasing bubbles. Her rescue call came just seconds after the last "It's a wrap!" for the very last scene of the movie. The movie crew was still applauding when the phone rang!

  Nicholas was rescued on Christmas Eve, beached with his dying mother. Those white patches on his back are scars from the third degree sun-burns he received from being out of the water. It took 9 months for the burns to heal. Now he is thriving, and a typical dolphin-adolescent!

Panama, named after Panama City Beach where she was rescued, is the eldest...at 40...and a pseudo-mother to Winter and Hope.

We were so happy that we saw the movie last year with our grandkids from Sarasota, and that they told us to be sure to visit the Aquarium!!! We will be with them this week, and we want to watch the movie again to check out all the scenes and animals from the site, including Oscar and Cooper, the river otters. We don't even remember them!

In the evening we walked to Pier 60 for the sunset celebrations. There wasn't much going on tonight, not like what we have seen in Key West. Maybe Saturday nights have more action.

The sun has set, but look how much you can see at dusk!

This street performer was excellent!

Tomorrow, Monday, after checking the weather, we hope to go offshore from Clearwater Pass to Longboat Pass in Sarasota, and then to our son's dock on Siesta Key! And we will see if the new filters get clogged!