Many young girls dream about being a mermaid, but Tami Baker has made this fantasy her reality as she pursues her dream as a professional mermaid. For the last three years, Mermaid Tami has been making a splash in the Mansfield, Ohio area, doing meet-and-greets and appearing at various events such as birthday parties and charity events.
Baker flashes her glittering scales for the camera in modeling, underwater modeling and underwater videos. Every fin she dons is a work of art, attracting attention and admiration. Crafty and creative, Baker makes some of her own fin-tails.
“I’m currently working on an Ariel-inspired one,” Baker shared. “My silicon one is purchased from a girl in Hawaii named Mermaid Kariel. She’s a professional tail-maker.” As this implies, Baker said there is a much larger mermaid community than one would imagine; however, she is the only one local to Mansfield.
As the only mermaid in her area, Baker is a hot commodity, and she is already booking events for 2018. Her popularity has come as a pleasant surprise because when she first started out as a mermaid, she was just doing it for fun. It was a hobby just for her. Then before she knew it, she was getting request upon request to come to different events and parties.
“You definitely get a lot of attention when you wear your tail out places,” said Baker. “People really enjoy seeing things like that.”
Some of the bigger events in which Baker appears as Mermaid Tami are held at the Pleasant Hill Lake. In these events, she interacts with the kids, letting them get their picture taken with her and playing mermaid games. As the grand finale, the kids get to swim with Mermaid Tami.
True to her mermaid-tendencies, Baker cannot get enough of the water. She recently bought a 1964 Drift-R Cruz houseboat and plans to spend as much time living on the water as possible in the summer. Baker even set it up so that she can take her free-range pet rabbit Winston to live with her on the lake. That way, they will never have to come ashore, not even to feed Winston, because he’ll be with them!
The houseboating community has also impressed Baker. She docks her boat on Dock 2, a close-knit group of boating neighbors that have even implemented their own Dock 2 App for ease of communication. “They’re definitely more like a family than they are just boat neighbors,” added Baker. “It’s really nice.”
Baker owned a pontoon boat before and she said she is excited to have a houseboat with an enclosure now so they won’t be ruled by the weather. “We’re definitely looking forward to this coming year being able to be out there rain or shine.”
With the freedom offered by her new houseboat, Mermaid Tami will be living the dream on the water all summer long, just as any mermaid naturally should.