February 3, 2016

Today was our tour of the Dolphin House, a must see.  What an incredible afternoon we spent about 2 hours there for filming and talking. I will try and include a picture, he Ashley Saunders is from here but went to college in Wisconsin then grad. school at Harvard and came back home to teach for 30 years. This house he started in 1993. I will send a link and you can get a better view and idea what it is all about. www.doLPinhousebimini.com.

We met a gentlemen whose name was Chipper and he was a carver and had carved a piece for the Dolphin House.

February 4, 2016

We walked to the Bimini Big Game Club Resort and Marina for 10am.and were there for about an hour. ( original owners were The Bacardi's) .We were given a tour and interview of the resort so we can go back and film. It is truly a resort . They have a motel unit and also single apartments. Big Game Club are very active into fishing and have many tournaments here. I have a picture of the structure they use to weight the Marlins. Right now the Discovery Channel has a crew here filming for Shark Week which is on their channel. Bo was able to interview a gentlemen involved in this production. We saw where they have the cages that divers get into with all the bars and can encounter sharks.

We walked back to Dolphin House to have Ashley sign more release papers and I was able to give him one of my nature treasure. Two years ago I found a glass bottle on the beach at Stocking Island. The bottle was from Trinidad and I filled it with tiny shells and then made a twine tie with shells attached around the neck of the bottle. I used this as a decor. Now Ashley has it for his home.

We took a shuttle to the very end of the Island to The Marina at Resort World Bimini. There is a Hilton hotel and housing addition here. The sea plane lands not far from here 4 times a day. We took a taxi back to the marina for $10 and spent some time gathering our thought and preparing for the next day.

About 3:30 I was walking to the beach and in a building next to the marina were 2 gentlemen outside. I stopped to ask a question about the huge fences land across from them. They were telling history and had pictures so called Bo and he came right over. He showed us pictures of what the estate had looked like back in prohibition days. It was bought and built for people from the US and later sold to people from DC. Part of it was destroyed by hurricanes but enough stand the family still comes today. The gentleman that owned the building (a disco) was named Star as he had been an athlete and coached for years taking youth baseball teams all over to play in competition. Star told us about people that had built and owned property for years and then sold it. One tidbit was the movie, "Silence of the Lamb" had the last scene filmed here right down the street so have to watch the movie again. We talked and looked at pictures for maybe an hour.  Wish we could get he along with others to sit for an evening of talk and history.

We then walked to the beach so I looked for shells and Bo enjoyed the sunset. As we got back to the boat the gentlemen on a sailboat across to us stopped to talk so we invited them over. They came with what they wanted to drink an some munchies. Everyone has a story and it is so interesting to hear all the stories about where they are from and why they are doing this and where they are headed. As we were talking the boat next to us from Chii (57 ft. Swan) needed more water hose to fill tanks. We all carry water hose that is used ONLY for water so gave them one of our 35ft hoses.

Here is a picture of the front of the Dolphin House, all hand done. Dolphins are 6 ft. It is like this all over, the sides, the steps to 2nd floor all of it unbelievable.

Joyce