The aim of the proposed work is to design energy optimization routing protocol to improve the energy efficiency and packet delivery ratio in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UWASN) using hybrid CAT-Dolphin Clustering Algorithm (CDA) in comparison with the Channel Aware Routing (CAR) protocol. Materials and methods: The routing performance of hybrid CDA is compared with traditional channel aware routing using Network Simulator (NS2 2.35) in randomly deployed underwater acoustic sensor simulation environment by aqua-sim. Results: The performance of proposed hybrid CDA reduces the energy consumption (9%) and delay (7%). Statistical analysis shows that significant value of energy (P=0.002; P<0.05) and delay (P=0.003; P<0.05) Conclusion: Within the limits of this study, hybrid CDA with fast convergence achieves good routing performance metrics in comparison with channel aware routing.