Bimini is renowned as the place to go to catch big fish. Whether you're sipping morning coffee at Capt. Bob's or having an afternoon Kalik at the bar at the Compleat Angler, the walls are filled with pictures of huge creatures of the sea, hauled up by their flippers on the docks and labeled with their weight: 300, 400, 500 pounds and more. So it's a good karmic feeling to be riding on Bill Keefe's Bimini Undersea dive boat with about 12 other hunters, heading off the north point of Bimini not to search and destroy, but to commune with some of the local residents: a pod or two of spotted dolphins. That the boat passes right over the Bimini Road, that underwater roadway of huge rectangular building blocks which seems to be a highway to Atlantis, adds to the slightly New Age feeling of this adventure. Dolphins, after all, have a hallowed place in King Neptune's court. Our guides, Melanie and Krista, have prepared us: There are no guarantees that we will actually see dolphins and no refunds if we don't. It's a big ocean out here, they are wild animals and there are no scheduled performances. Still, we're told they see dolphins on about eight out of 10 trips. We try to keep our hopes in check as Krista cruises slowly around the shallow banks for an hour. Nothing but the bluest of oceans, empty in all directions.Finally, a squeal from a Japanese girl. Flipper, Ho! First one, then three, then a whole pod of them begin to frolic in the wake of the dive boat. We hustle into wetsuits, don masks, flippers and snorkels, and leap off the stern. These are spotted dolphins, not the more familiar gray bottlenose. Still, out here in the wild, it's the spotted ones that tend to be playful around humans. In the late afternoons (the dolphin trip runs from 2 to 6 p.m.), the dolphins are enjoying their "happy hour:" playing, chasing, even making love (dolphins, like humans, have sex just for fun).As instructed, we humans swim close together, impersonating a pod of our own. The dolphins swim around, under and through us, whistling and chattering in that eerie, high-pitched dolphin-speak. Melanie puts on a weight belt and scoots down the 20 feet or so to the sandy bottom, and about four of her finned friends follow. They roll around together in a game of underwater tag. A mom and her pup swim right up to me, staring at me eyeball to eyeball, before turning in perfect tandem and blitzing off. After about 10 minutes, the dolphins swam away. We all piled back into the boat, chased them down, and jumped back in and played some more. But they left again, and that was it. But playtime ended, and we chugged our way back to Alice Town.Surely, swimming around and playing with our undersea friends has to be better than catching them, hauling them up on a block-and-tackle and eating them? I should have asked my new friends to go ask the marlins if they don't agree. It's got to be better karma, anyway.