Dolphin dream became reality

For about a year, Terry Howson spent each day - sunrise to sunset - out on the waters of the Sound in an attempt to befriend the area's bottlenose dolphin population.

This was back in 1989 and Terry, aged 23, had a dream to start his own charter-boat company, not knowing the relationship he was forming with the dolphins and the foundations he was setting would one day become the ecotourism business, Rockingham Wild Encounters.

"I was already in a charter boat with my brother in Broome, things were going quite well, we pioneered a lot of that area for charter boats in 1987," he said.

"We bought another boat and I started working on Cockatoo Island for (Alan) Bond's syndicate to control all the charters for the resort, then the airline strike came through and crushed all those plans."

Terry decided then and there that the Broome business was always going to be his brother's and he wanted to branch out on his own and not be in anyone else's shadow.

He travelled around Australia, trying to come up with a concept for a charter-boat company and returned to Rockingham where his family had long established roots.

Terry's great-grandfather George Grigg came to the area about 80 years ago and bought the Rockingham Hotel, nearby shops, tea-rooms and a public dance hall.

"He was an inspiration to me as far as the tourism angle goes - he was one of the first guys to bring it down here," Terry said.

"I always remembered what he did and how he did it."

Terry was also inspired by his father Barry, who he described as "the absolute optimist".

"He was a 'give it a go' kind of bloke, there was nothing ever negative," Terry said.

"He believed if you do things hard enough, you'll become successful at it, which was pretty good grounding for what I was going to do."

When Terry came back to Rockingham, he borrowed his father's 18ft boat and headed out to the ocean, trying to learn everything he could about the dolphins.

Seven months later, one curious dolphin, named Logo, swam up to Terry - a memory still vivid in his mind today.

"She was really important because she introduced me to other dolphins one by one and I started swimming with others as well," he said. Terry knew he had something great going on with the dolphins but he was stumped about how he could turn the experience into a business.

"I wanted to do it differently (to Monkey Mia and the Dolphin Discovery Centre in Bunbury) and wasn't into feeding them and didn't want to bring them into the beach.

"How do you make friends with a wild animal if you're not feeding it?"

Terry said he was lucky enough at the time not to have anything holding him back - he had no debts, no mortgage and no girl- friend.

"I bought a boat for dolphin watching and I started to take one person out swimming every now and then," he said.

After trying a few different ways to enable people, who weren't as strong swimmers and as familiar with the ocean waters, to interact with the dolphins, he returned to how he began - free swimming.

"We came up with underwater scooters, so you can swim more freely in the water and do tight loops like them," he said.

"That's what it's about; as much as we have fun with them, they have fun with us."

At the time, Terry invited the Department of Parks and Wildlife (then known as CALM) to check out what he was up to.

"I showed them how I could swim with them and they were really blown away," he said.

"They said: 'What do you want from us?' And I said: 'I want you the licence me' and they said: "We don't have licences'.

"I knew that as soon as I started, there'd be every charter boat under the sun down here and it would just be chaos but they said: "No worries".

Terry said Rockingham Wild Encounters discovered, in the years since, that the way the business began meant visitors generally got between an hour to an hour- and-a-half of interaction with the dolphins.

Now operating another three vessels conducting tours to Penguin and Seal islands, the businsss attracted 100,000 people this season, including pop superstar Mariah Carey, who took time off her world tour last November to swim with dolphins.