Review: Tropics Boat Tour

Alpha Omega Family Adventures was hosted by The Tropics Boat Tour. This does not affect the opinions shared. All opinions are our own.

Planning a visit to Clearwater Beach, Florida? This is truly one of the most beautiful beaches to visit with crystal clear water, beautiful soft white sand, and gorgeous beach sunsets.  One of the things Clearwater is most known for though is the dolphins!  The warm, Gulf of Mexico waters are the perfect location to observe Bottlenose Dolphins living in their natural environment.  

Located in the bay of Clearwater, Winter, the dolphin lives at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Winter is a bottlenose dolphin who got herself caught in a crab trap which caused her to lose her tail. She was taken to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium to live since she no longer could live in the wild.  While living there, she was fitted with a silicone and plastic tail.  Dolphin Tale, the movie, is Winter’s story. Winter has been living at the aquarium since 2005.  Partly because of this, dolphins have become the unofficial mascot of Clearwater!  

Visiting Clearwater, you will quickly realize how important dolphins are to the area.  In front of most hotels, restaurants, and stores you will find a beautifully painted dolphin statue.  Knowing how many dolphins are in the area made me want to add a dolphin boat tour to our must do list when we visited the area. Doing a quick Google search, you will see that there are multiple dolphin boat tour companies to choose from. Our family was hosted by The Tropics Boat Tours to experience the dolphins.  

With everything going on in the world with COVID-19, I will admit we were a little hesitant to do something so “touristy”. We were hoping to stay to ourselves and out in nature on this road trip of ours. After seeing how this boat tour handled the safety factors quickly put us at ease being around other people on this tour.  Not only do they require their staff to wear masks, but they’ve installed the plexi shields between employees and customer contact locations.  They encourage guests to wear their masks.  Multiple sanitizing stations are found around the boat.  Between each scheduled tour the boat is completely sanitized.  Lower guest capacity complying with CDC guidelines. Social distancing is suggested at one ‘dolphin’ apart from others. No smoking/vaping allowed as well as no group congregation near the bar. 

When checking in for the boat tour, drink packages can be purchased.  There are many choices from unlimited sodas for the kids to unlimited mixed drinks for the adults with other options in between.  We only purchased the unlimited sodas for the boys and believe me, they fully drank to their full potential!  The mixed drinks look and sound fun with names like Tropical Pirate, Bikini Berry, and Sunset Sky.

While waiting to board the boat, we waited either on the dock or the sidewalk, everyone with masks on.  It was finally time for boarding!  We waited for the Captain to call our name.  The boys could hardly contain their excitement, not only to see dolphins, but also to go for a boat ride!  We head out into the bay area and under the bridge.  And, right under the bridge, dolphins were spotted!  The excitement from both the crew and other guests was so contagious!  We circled around keeping an eye on these two dolphins until we lost them in the water.  The crew told us the dolphins were most likely feeding.  They explained that the dolphins swim in a circle, sort of trapping the fish for lunch. 

After this, the captain turned the boat into the other part of the bay driving us past homes that celebrities like Hulk Hogan and Tom Cruise had previously owned. We went by Bird Island which is a man-made island solely for local birds.  Any person trespassing to the island will face heavy fines. 

We finally head out under another bridge to open waters. The excitement is building! Unfortunately, because the winds coming from the storms in the western portion of the Gulf were causing the waves to be strong, we had to turn around. Turned out they were too strong for our boat to venture into the open water.  My boys were so dissappointed.  We didn’t realize the two dolphins we saw at the beginning of the dolphin tour would be the only dolphins we saw!  Unfortunately, the weather is very unpredictable and we had no idea this would be the case. We passed by some huge pelicans!

Andy and I had taken this exact tour last April when we took a quick getaway to Clearwater to celebrate our 15th anniversary.  If you missed that post, check it out here.  This tour we had taken was so exciting we just knew we had to bring our boys back to it.  We had seen dolphins in the bay on the way to open waters.  Once we were in the open waters, we saw multiple, different pods of dolphins.  We even were able to see a baby dolphin in one of the pods.  These dolphins had put on quite the show for us with jumping and swimming in the waves behind the boat.  Each boat tour will be as unique as each dolphin seen! 

We hope to try another dolphin boat tour with the boys so they can fully experience what Andy and I experienced since it was so exciting!

Tropics Boat Tours not only offer dolphin exploration tours, but there is a 5 O’Clock Somewhere Dolphin Exploration Tour, sunset celebration cruises, and private events can also be booked. The sunset tour includes a complimentary sunset champagne toast. The dolphin exploration tours include a dolphin sighting guarantee! Check out their webpage for current pricing and offers here!

 
Next time you are planning a trip to Clearwater Beach, be sure to check out Tropics Boat Tours to complete your trip!