Not a bad place to have to moor and go diving.

In 2014 we traveled to Dominica for the first time. We flew to Guadeloupe, got on board a power cat and motored the 20+ miles to Dominica the following morning. A power cat is like a catermoran, but instead of a sail, it just uses a motor to cruise. That way a power cat is not wind dependent and generallys is quite a bit faster in the water.

For the next week, we would dive than cruise to a new dive site pick up a local dive master and then dive some more. We set foot on the island of Dominica once that week, to have dinner and to return some dive gear to a local dive shop. The rest of the time we were either cruising down the coast, diving, sleeping or eating.

One of the songs that kept playing in my head during the trip was a song about Dominica that I had heard when I was a child. Here is a link to a video clip from the Ed Sullivan show in the early 60’s about the nun who wrote and sang the song “Dominica”.

Dominica has an abundance of underwater wildlife. If you like to find small sea creatures there are plenty of them to see. I don’t think I have ever seen so many banded shrimp and small crabs as I saw on this trip. I am relatively certain I have never see so many golden crinoid, a type of feather star as we saw in Dominica.

Sponges corals and crionoids with fish in the background

And, if you have lots of small animals, you often have a variety of predators. We saw quite a few trumpet fish.

And, we saw large animals. For more than a half an hour as we were motoring along the coast of the island, we were escorted by a dolphin.

Dominica is a volcanic island. On one dive we took a couple of eggs from the galley and took them down to the sand 80 feet below the boat and buried them in the sand. We then went on our dive and by the time we came back the eggs were cooked and were hard-boiled. Dominica as the top of a volcano rises up out of the ocean. As a result, if you go about a mile off shore the depth of the water drops to over 1,000 feet in-depth. That deep trench near the Atlantic ocean makes for excellent habitat for whales. In Dominica, if you go with a local operator who has a permit, you can swim with whales.

Swimming with whales is done on snorkel gear but it is with sperm whales, a relatively rare animal. Unfortunately, we did not have time to go snorkeling with the whales. One of my friends visited Dominica a few weeks before we were there, and spent quite a bit of time in the water with several sperm whales, and of course had a great time. I am going to hopefully time my next trip to Dominica to try to swim with the sperm whales.