Feel very lucky to have fallen into this video footage. Clear water, good light, shallow water, white sand reflective bottom ... oh, and a few dozen willing spinner dolphins on the move. Usually, a boat would drop the divers on the pod and they would just swim off into the distance out of visibility in short order. For whatever reason, curiosity they let me tag along for a while, likely related to the dive scooter on was on. Martin Stepanek suggested swimming on your back fast beneath the surface might bring them in. He said to try to impress or otherwise stimulate their curiosity. Martin said to avoid trying to impress them with normal free diving skills, breathholding as they will see what lame pollywogs we really are and dash off. So, I would motor along inverted and generally they allowed me to keep up or actually waited for me several times. They even circled back a couple of times. Accommodating cetaceans! They even had several young, calves with them but the moms and dads were ok with me swimming with and through the school. I understand they forage in the pelagic reaches around Sha'ab Sataya, then rest and play over the sands encompassed by the reef. More about the Long-Nosed Spinner Dolphin (Stenella longirostris), below.* Fun stuff, checkout the video, (still learning editing so apologies for the busts) and you can see what I mean ...

http://fksa.org/forumdisplay.php?f=92

Have fun,
Rick

Ricki instead of linking to your own forum and having people search through for the report, you can link the video directly from Vimeo. I think it's much easier for readers that way. Thanks for posting the report.

Nice video & nice narration.

Thanks for the input Drew. There is some useful info in the website writeup not included in the video, hence the link. For those that would like to link directly to the video, here it is:




LINK -
http://vimeo.com/6854619

Thank you! Just started doing voice overs, need to work on that some more. Have a couple more videos or so to do on the Red Sea trip including the Labyrinth (Sha'ab Claudia). There was also a fairly strange one dealing with dive sled drops at:




LINK -
http://vimeo.com/6802269