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Dolphins
Mon Aug 22, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton. Today on The Weather Notebook, a summer story from the Irish Sea.
Invited to tag along on a sea-watch off Ireland’s south coast, I accept without hesitation. Soon, on a quiet summer sea of long slow swells, a companion spots a bottlenose dolphin breaching. We enter dolphin country. Hundreds of them. Engine off, we hear the them breathing, blowing, snorting.
Suddenly the dolphins disappear. We motor south. I accidentally peer below our bow. A dozen dolphins are taking turns riding our bow wave. We peer down sphinctered blow holes. As we cruise back to port, someone recalls that a National Geographic photographer and his assistant visited the Aegean to investigate the ancient account of a dolphin saving a boy’s life.
At a headland where dolphins were frequently seen, they rented a rowboat, waited. Soon they spotted the telltale fins and put their backs into the oars. Once amongst the dolphins, the assistant jumped overboard and thrashed about, crying for help. A dolphin nosed him carefully to shore, the photographer frenziedly snapping, frenziedly rowing.
Afterwards, the photographer noticed that, in all the excitement, he’d failed to remove the lens cap from his camera. They wondered what to do and just then saw a herd perhaps the same herd of dolphins. Off they went. Your man jumped overboard,, and pretended he was drowning. But this time a dolphin came up to him and thumped him repeatedly, resoundingly, with his tail, knocking the stuffing out of him. The herd swam off.
Never cry wolf? Never cry dolphin.
That’s our Irish commentator, Chuck Kruger. The Weather Notebook is generously funded by Subaru of America.
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