KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
The Lozano family, Matthew, Lynn, Lucas and Victor, run the ocean tour business Dolphin Excursions. In addition to the the tours, Victor does work for movies and television shows filming in Hawaii, using his 23-foot Zodiac, Malu. The name means "calm" in Hawaiian.
The Lozano family all help
keep the business afloat
It's another sunny morning on the Waianae Coast and Victor Lozano is in his element. Zipping along the ocean in his yellow 32-foot Scarib, Lozano scours the water for any sign of spinner dolphins.
His watercraft, dubbed the "banana boat" by his competitors, is hard to miss. It jumps waves like a jet ski but offers the stability of a larger vessel.
The boat, which carries up to 24 passengers on its daily excursions from Waianae Boat Harbor, gives its occupants just enough of a thrill ride to nearly make them forget why they came along in the first place.
The dolphins, though, are the focus of the trip and during the winter, the humpback whales are popular as well. Depending upon the type of excursion, dolphin-viewing passengers either slip into the water with their snorkel gear for "passive observation," as Lozano calls it, or observe from the boat.
Sometimes, the dolphins provide an encore by bouncing along the surface like skipping stones. The trips always end with a snorkeling session at a nearby reef to look at turtles and fish.
Lozano, who has worked in the marine industry for 20 years, started Dolphin Excursions with his wife, Lynn, nearly five years ago to realize his dream about running his own business.
"I always dreamed of having my own boat and having my own show," Victor said. "The cost of this vessel, though, was not really cheap and it took awhile to get to the stage where I could get my own boat. I even joked about putting people on my back to swim out there."
Nowadays, though, Victor doesn't have to worry about going to such extremes. The boat he uses has inflatable sides, a stainless steel safety rail and a rigid bottom. He calls it Naia I, after the Hawaiian word for dolphin.
KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
Victor on a tour off the Waianae Coast.
Victor's first boat, which is stored in Kailua, is a 23-foot Zodiac that he rents out and drives for television and movie productions filming in Hawaii.
The boat's name, Malu, has a double meaning. The name incorporates the first two letters of his children's names, Matthew and Lucas, and also after the Hawaiian word for calm, malu, as in malu kai, calm sea.
Unlike zoos, aquariums and marine parks, Lynn said Dolphin Excursions offers visitors an opportunity to see animals in their natural habitat.
"I think anytime you see anything in its normal environment, it's much more exciting," Lynn said. "It's like going to the jungle and seeing a giraffe. It's much more exciting because it's not in captivity and anything can happen.
"Being on that part of the island, it's remote. And the boat is also fun. It really lends itself to viewing those animals. It's all part of the experience. I don't think the experience would be the same if you were on a cruise ship and were viewing the animals from a couple hundred yards away."
Snorkel Bob's Manager Kelli Kekai, whose Honolulu store supplies snorkel gear and tickets customers for Dolphin Excursions, said the intimacy of a small tour group and Victor's expertise and personality make the trip.
DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Victor Lozano, owner of Dolphin Excursions, helps snorkelers put on their gear at a spot off the Waianae Coast.
"He's got the best trip on the island," Kekai said. "As far as an owner-operated trip, it's a lot more personable to customers and you have much better service than some of the bigger trips, where you have people working on board who don't have as much invested in it."
Kekai also said Victor has a keen sense of where to find the marine animals. That is, if the animals don't find him first.
"Vic is kind of psychic with the animals out there," she said. "He knows where every critter is out there before anybody else sees them. He's got humpback whales that are so used to him that they wait between trips until he comes back out. He knows where the animals are and he's spot-on with them."
Victor said females make up 80 percent of Dolphin Excursions' customers. He said their interest is apparent by the dolphin tattoos and dolphin jewelry they wear. With few exceptions, their desire to see dolphins is rewarded.
"Waianae has the highest success rate of finding dolphins than any other island," he said. "There are only going to be two or three days of the year that we won't find them."
Victor said dolphins, which are nocturnal feeders, come closer to shore during the day. He said he tries to follow their patterns in order to spot them. But he said he's careful to abide by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which prohibits harassing, feeding and touching the dolphins.
"During the daytime, the dolphins go into rest mode," said Victor. "They're socializing. They're giving birth. They're using half of their brain.
"They will shut down half of their brain while the other half is alert to what's going on around it. It's like sleepwalking. They're voluntary breathers and they're not ever fully asleep like we are. They have to think to breathe and they have to look for predators."
During the winter months, humpback whales become an added attraction with locals representing about 50 percent of Dolphin Excursions' clientele. Although federal law requires the boat stay at least 100 yards away, the whales even at that distance strike an imposing sight.
"A lot of people are amazed when they just hear the spout," Victor said. "They can feel the size of the animal. The whales exhale at 300 miles per hour and they're exhaling a car load's worth of air in a matter of seconds. Many times, when we're waiting for the animals to surface, I'll say we're going to hear them before we can see them."
Dolphin Excursions faces competition from four other companies, but he said the Scarib, which averages 30 knots with passengers, gives him a speed advantage.
"One of my main competitors (Waianae-based Wild Side Specialty Tours) uses a 42-foot catamaran, so they're slower," he said. "We use different philosophies, and I'm not saying one is better than the other, but by having speed, we're able to cover more ground to find more animals."
Victor said both Dolphin Excursions and Wild Side, besides giving their customers a chance to get in the water, also dispense conservational and educational information about the animals.
"I figure it makes the experience more interesting," Victor said.
The main focus of the three other competitors, Victor said, is to allow passengers to view and photograph the animals. However, their trips don't allow the customers to get into the water, he said.
Victor, a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 665, said he became involved with the motion picture industry a few years ago because of his boating skills. He began driving the Zodiac, which at the time was his only boat, for various film-related water scenes. One day, "Baywatch Hawaii" star David Hasselhoff accepted an invitation to take a Dolphin Excursions trip.
"He just loved it," Victor said, "and within a week he came out twice. Then he was interviewed by a local travel publication and the Travel Channel and, on both occasions unsolicited by me, was asked what were some of his highlights for activities to do here. He mentioned Dolphin Excursions as one of his top things to do, and that sort of put us on the map."
Today, Dolphin Excursions, which highlights Hasselhoff on its Web site, has eight employees, including two captains who drive the boat besides Victor. Victor's wife, Lynn, is the vice president but stays behind the scenes.
She helps with accounting, marketing strategies, interviewing and hiring in addition to holding down a full-time job as the director of adult competition for the Hawaii Pacific Section of the United States Tennis Association.
Matthew, 15, who will be a high school sophomore in the fall, crews on occasion and will work for his dad this summer. The Lozanos' other son, Lucas, is 7.
When Victor isn't skippering the Scarib, he often can be found behind the wheel of the Zodiac working with the union's marine department.
Most recently, Victor was hired to transport special effects people to Kualoa Ranch to set off pyrotechnics for a scene in the TV show, "ER." He's also worked with the marine department for TV shows "Baywatch Hawaii," "Wind on Water" and "Fantasy Island," and the movies "Blue Crush" and "Godzilla."
Lynn said she loves the ocean but admits her affection can't match her husband's. Last month, for example, Victor joined four other crew members in sailing a J33 from San Francisco to Hawaii. One of the crew members, Chief Executive Officer Ray Sanborn of child-care provider Kamaaina Kids, is a good friend of Victor's and a minority investor in Dolphin Excursions.
Victor, who was marine operations manager for Honolulu-based Nautilus Subsea Adventures from 1993 to 1998, began forming Dolphin Excursions' business plan in 1998 when he was operating a vessel that transported crew and supplies to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, 30 miles offshore of Bell Pass, La.
When Victor returned to Hawaii, he obtained backing from the Small Business Administration, received a loan from the Bank of Hawaii, acquired the Zodiac and his business was up and running.
He had developed different tour programs for other people, but said his inspiration for the type of tour he runs today came from his first job 20 years ago as a captain for Kaneohe-based SeaTrek Hawaii. At SeaTrek, he would sail from Kaneohe to Maui to pick up passengers, and then bring them on excursions to remote areas of other islands while educating them on sea life they would encounter.
For the first two years of Dolphin Excursions, it was a two-person operation as Victor drove the Zodiac virtually every day and Lynn helped with the office work. Then, thanks to the magazine and television exposure, Dolphin Excursions began to grow.
Victor purchased the Scarib a year-and-a-half ago and spent four months refitting the boat. It's been in operation for about a year now.
Today, the business generates $450,000 annually in gross revenues.
"My thinking was that if he wasn't able to create a program that would be successful with dolphins and whales, then nobody could," Lynn said. "It's not an easy industry to be successful. It requires someone who is hands on and someone who's dedicated.
"And I can tell you from observing, it wasn't easy to get started because he was working all the time. It was a sacrifice for the family to do that. But as every year goes on, it gets easier and easier."
