My husband and I had a wonderful time on this tour. Got home exhausted, but it was well worth it. The snorkeling at Kealakekua is incredible. You can get right up close to the corals and wildlife. We saw a sea turtle and even found a moray eel hiding inside a crevice.
The dolphin part of the tour was definitely fun but ended up feeling a bit too much like a hunt for my taste. There were half a dozen or so tour boats in the area, all with passengers out on the water chasing the pod of dolphins around. We’d jump in the water, swim hard trying to reach the area where the dolphins were spotted, only for them to have moved into another area of the bay. So then it was back on the boat, zoom over to a new area, jump in a try again. Lots of swimming and lots of getting in & out of the boat.
It was rather obvious by the end of this whole ordeal that the dolphins just wanted to get away, as they dove deep and left the bay after maybe an hour. No wonder with all those noisy boats and humans chasing them! Before that, though, a couple of them were playful with the folks in our group willing to dive down a bit in order to swim closer.
I was very disappointed, however, that our tour operators didn’t seem too concerned with conservation of the reef system. There was no warning for passengers to be careful of their fins around the shallow reef and I saw at least two people kick chunks of coral off without even noticing they did so. So sad!