Review: Captain Dan’s Around the Island Tours Chincoteague, VA

Captain Dan’s Around the Island Tours

Location: 4161 Main St, Chincoteague, VA 23336

Website: https://www.captaindanstours.com/

Booking: Made online, one day before trip

On Sunday, August 10th we boarded a pontoon boat for a 2.5 hour tour around Chincoteague Island. Why you may ask? So we could learn more about the local wildlife, of course. I was the one who really pushed for this, so I guess it was because I wanted to learn more about the local wildlife.

We had not taken any tours during our previous trips to Chincoteague and I was eager to learn more about the area than I had before. It had been two years since we had been there last and I feel like the boys were ready to sit still long enough for a boat tour.

We chose Captain Dan’s Tours as our service provider of choice. Perhaps, it was dumb luck to find his company because I didn’t do a deep research dive, but Captain Dan (the owner was our captain that day) was an absolute delight. I scheduled the 8:00 am tour because there were openings then and as an added bonus I thought that we might see more wildlife earlier in the day.

I keep saying wildlife, but I what I was really expecting to see were birds. One way that I know that I am getting older is that I have an intense desire to see birds. Birds!

Indeed, we did see birds. We saw egrets, geese, osprey, and gulls. We also saw THREE bald eagles perched on posts in the bay during our trip.

By the way, right now, I am doing something that I am not supposed to do. Captain Dan specifically warned us not to tell the group immediately following our tour about all of the wildlife we saw. I know you are not the group immediately after our tour, so I am not quite sure how to apply his request in this situation. However, I just looked up Captain Dan’s Around the Island Tours on Trip Advisor and it seems like everyone else is talking specifics about what types of wildlife they saw, so I think that I am in the clear.

But still, please forgive me in advance if you go on a Captain Dan tour and you don’t see anything.

[Honestly thought, if you don’t see anything on your cruise, you would still get to spend 2.5-3 hours in a boat with Captain Dan who is very entertaining and tells a lot of fun stories, so it won’t be time wasted. One of our favorite stories is about how his wife and children put in 40 hours a week at the beach. “She’s there like it’s her job. . . She says “you gotta ’em. . .like they are dogs, if not, they are gonna chew on the furniture. . .they go to bed at 7:30 at night practically because they are so tired from the beach, they never have any behavior problems.”]

Moving on . . .

We also saw lots of ponies on our cruise! The Chincoteague ponies all have cute names like: Beach Boy and Marsh Mallow. Captain Dan told us that up until the mid-90’s (?) they didn’t have names, but then they started to be named so that the ponies could be identified if they needed medical help or if one of the ponies got out from behind the fence they are supposed to stay inside of.

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Here’s a Little Aside about the Chincoteague Ponies:

On the last Wednesday in July, Chincoteague holds its annual pony swim. The ponies are corralled and some are auctioned off to raise money for the fire department. The rest, who are not auctioned are returned to their home on the southern end of Assateague Island the following Friday. The Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge caps the southern herd at 150 of ponies. Ponies are sold based on health and specific ratios of males to females.

Here is a website to Chincoteague pony photography taken by a friend of Captain Dan’s who puts together a guide to the ponies that was both in Captain Dan’s boat and the house that we rented.

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Let me recount one of my favorite parts of the pony part of the tour:

Captain Dan pulled his boat into what looked like a grassy marsh in the bay. We saw other tour groups pulled in that area too. Then we looked and saw that ponies were there. When some of the female passengers on our boat cruise laid eyes this particular pony in the picture below, they audibly swooned.

The stallion in the picture is named Riptide and apparently he is famous.

If you Google “Surfer’s Riptide” you will see multiple results including newspaper articles and Facebook pictures. He seems to be famous with people on and off the island.

It seems that Riptide has taken up with different fillies and mares and when he does, adult humans text each other about it and it is important gossip around the island.

We also learned from Captain Dan that there are some ponies in Chincoteague that have celebrity status. Human’s around the island seem to like to talk about the exploits of the ponies like it is a soap opera or The Real Housewives (Housewives) of Assateague Island.

For example, he told us that Riptide had been involved in a long term, stable triad relationship, with two mares and their offspring but it broken up by a young filly this spring. One day, Captain Dan’s wife texted him while he was in the barber shop getting his hair cut this spring because Riptide, it seemed, had left his new paramour and tried to get back to one of his original pony girlfriends. In the meantime, she had been moved to a different part of the island and he knew where she was but couldn’t get to her. He went through a fence, either by knocking it down or he found a break in it and ended up on someone’s property loose around the island. It was big news in Chincoteague.

Captain Dan educated us all of these things and more. He grew up in Chincoteague and has mostly lived there except for the period of time after high school where he moved south to be a co-host on a morning show on a country music radio station. I am forever indebted to Captain Dan because I feel like I know have insiders information on what it is like to live in Chincoteague.

In summation, I highly recommend Captain Dan’s Around the Island Tours. 10 our of 10, would recommend.

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