I spent a long time watching the pods move up the coast.  I would follow them, watching them work and interact with the other members of the pod on those long summer days.  Everyday, the same pod for several years.  I knew them by name because I had named them, Whitey, Chip, Stumpy, Blacky, Scar and the list of names goes on.  There were around sixty members of this group of Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins.  We got to the point where I was accepted or at least tolerated by them to the point of taking part in the hunts from time to time.  This would be frowned on by some as too intrusive but, if you think about it, it’s a big ocean and the dolphin can choose to leave anytime, it was always their choice.  It’s the way it has to be.  Most people don’t know that marine mammals are protected in US waters.  The Marine Mammal Protection Act protects all marine mammals form us.  You can not swim with them, you can not feed or bait them, you can not try to heard them, you can only get so close to them and a close approach is only for a set time limit.  These laws carry a hefty fine of $25,000 for you and I.  The Marine parks get around these laws by using animals that were born in captivity or gaining research facility status.  In this country I only know of one research facility, The Dolphin Research Center at Grassy Key, just north of Marathon.  They take in dolphins with the skin sores caused by the chlorinated water at the Marine parks.  Most of my days with the dolphins was taken up by explaining to the tourist what the animals were doing.  What looks like play to most of us, is usually work for the dolphins.  They fish most of the time.  I’ll tell you some to the encounters I had with the dolphins and with the tourist.  I’m not sure wich is more interesting.

One thing I would tell the people on the boat was all about the dolphins echolocation abilities.  The dolphin can emit a sound from it’s nasal cavity back by the blow hole.  This sound travels forward and though an organ called the melon in the forehead.  The melon works like a lens for sound, as it changes shape it can focus the sound wave.  The wave travels out into the water until it hits a fish, then bounces back to the dolphin.  The sound enters the lower jaw bone and back to the dolphin brain for processing.  It  now knows the size of the fish, direction it is traveling and at what speed.  When first looking for the fish the sound is sent out in a wide pattern but, as it locates and closes in the sound is focused by the melon to a finer and finer cone of sound.  When the dolphin gets to within a couple feet it can put out a highly intense and sharply focused burst of sound that can stun or kill the fish.  This is like the radar tracking ability of a modern fighter jet.  As I was explaining this one day on the boat I noticed one old man smiling and nodding at me.  I asked him what he did and he said he did research on dolphins and bats for the defense department.  They are trying to get more of what these animals can do into the cockpit.  Bats, for instance, can even tell surface texture.  By the way, a mother dolphin will sometimes scold an out of line youngster with a nose to nose blast of sound.  A dolphin swat. 

I had one group of women get on the boat and no sooner than we cleared the breakers of the shore they announced that they were from another planet.  They now had my full attention.  They said their planet was inhabited only by dolphins and that they were, in fact, dolphins in human form.  They wanted to get in the water and swim with their brothers and sisters in what they described as a religious act.   I couldn’t let this happen but, I was stumped about what to do.  Would I be violating their rights to religious freedom.  Would they sue me?  What if they drowned?  What if they were attacked by a male dolphin (it was mating season)?  After a few mind boggling moments, this is what I said, “How many of you are wearing sun tan lotion?”  They all raised their hands.  “Coming from the planet Peloris, you must know that most sun tan lotion is poison to dolphin.  It breaks down the mucus layer on their skin and causes infections”.  This was true but, even if it wasn’t, it worked on these looneys and they stayed in the boat.  Of course the big Marine parks will let you pet the dolphin.

I mentioned being attacked by dolphin because most of the time I was around them was mating season.  One thing they seem to like more than fish.  This appears to be a very brutal affair.  The big bulls will stop at nothing.  I have seen them kill babys while getting at the mothers.  Not a good time to go communing with Flipper.  He weighs in around 600 lbs and has an erection about three feet long.  I don’t know why but they seemed to be the most active when I would have a boat load of 12 year old girls.  I used to think they just liked to embarrass me, dolphin humor.   The sea would have semen floating all around us and I would be trying to explain what they were doing in a way that wouldn’t get me labeled a child sex offender.  I would lie a whole bunch.  The females laying on their backs on the surface and slapping the water with their tails and the males jumping ten feet out of the water with huge red boners and the water covered with foaming semen.  Go ahead, try to come up with a way to describe that to a kid.  And don’t forget, it’s a two hour tour.  I will surely go to hell for some of the lies I told those children.

I had two little girls get on the boat one morning telling me they wanted to see Flipper.  I began telling them about what the dolphin were really up to etc, etc.  The girls eyes and ears glazed over to let me know they had tuned me out.  They didn’t want any part of my version of Flipper.  They sat at the very front.  We hadn’t gone very far when a good sized fish jumped up about two feet in front of them.  It was followed by a big male dolphin.  When the jaws of the dolphin slammed shut on that Mackrel it sounded like a couple 2×4s being slapped together as hard as you can.  The spray of fish blood and guts nailed the little girls square in their astonished faces.  It was over and gone in a nano second.  The little girls ran to the back of the boat with me and stayed there.  Flipper, in their minds, had been transformed into Jaws.  I began my spiel again and this time they listened.  “Dolphins are the best fisherman on the face of the planet……..”

When the ocean got too rough to launch from the beach we would take people into the sound waters.  Most people would question if there were dolphin in the sound.  I would reassure them that we had a 90% chance of finding them.  One day a mother and her son climbed aboard.  We were going out into the sound and the kid started in on me.  “There aren’t any dolphin in the sound, why are we going in the sound”” he sneered at me.  I said there were and he called me a liar.  I looked to his mother and got a blank stare.  The kid kept it up as we headed out.  I said that we would see them and he said, “How far away?”  I said, “Right next to the boat”.  He said, “Liar!”  The kid was around 13 or 14 and really had me pissed off internally.  The kid quieted down as we chugged along and began to hang his head over the rail as he looked at the surface of the water.  The boats had very low sides so, his head was only about two feet from the waters surface.  All at once a big dolphin surfaced and blew right in his face.  That kid snapped up with his eyes poppin’ out of his head, his mouth was wide open with nothing coming  out (for a change)  and dolphin snot dripping from his nose.  I thanked my dolphin friend under my breath and asked the kid, “That close enough?”

I’ve painted a picture of the dolphin as all work and no play.  Most of what we see as play is work.  Riding the bow wave of a boat and surfing in on the face of a wave at the beach are just ways to gain a speed advantage over their prey.  Jumping is a way to drive or heard schools of fish.  The list goes on but, I don’t want to give the impression that they don’t play or fool around, they do.  I once watched two dolphin playing catch with a jellyfish that was the same size and shape as a softball.  Their heads were sticking out of the water about 20 feet apart as they tossed it back and forth for around fifteen minutes.  They had obviously played a lot of ball.                      After seeing the things I did, I always wondered what went on that we never see.  Just how smart are they and are they really from the planet Peloris.