“The dolphins like to catch our wake,” the captain said. “I guess it’s like boogie boarding, at least that’s what a teenager told me.”
We each had binoculars on a cord around our necks, but none of us bothered to use them. The dolphins weren’t swimming at a distance. They were right under our boat, their eyes staring up at us, quizzingly. One came so close I could have reached out to touch him, but the captain had warned us not to do that. Dolphins were playful, but they were wild. One of them might grab a person’s hand and pull him down into the water.
“A woman drowned that way,” the captain had told us. “Not on my craft, though. I’d never let a passenger do something that stupid.”
“Why did they grab her?’ Bob asked.
The explanation was that the dolphins probably just wanted to play with the woman. The captain sighed and gave a head shake that involved a disgusted snort. “We’ll never know what wild animals are thinking since they can’t talk to us. Perhaps they don’t understand that humans need more air than they do. Maybe they figured the woman could survive without breathing? Who knows. But humans are fragile, even more so than dolphins. Before the boat’s crew could rescue her, the woman was gone. She’d drowned. No teeth marks, of course. No sign of violence other than being dragged into the water.”
I could understand the woman’s temptation to touch the dolphins, to reach out and connect with them. There was something in the way the dolphins tilted their heads and made their funny sounds: clicking, barking, squealing, wailing like babies, and entreating us to come play with them. But the dolphins were also opening and closing their mouths, and we could see the heavy rows of teeth. Dolphins were carnivores, and even though the captain assured us that they wouldn’t eat a person and preferred fish, I had absolutely no inclination to dive in and swim with them.
The dolphins remained with us for less than ten minutes, then sped off, probably looking for more entertainment among the boats we could see in the distance. Captain Joe said a school of dolphins could swim more than twenty miles an hour. That was easy to believe because one moment, the dolphins were bobbing about in their wonderful silliness, and then suddenly like a speeding jet, they were gone, only a silver image in the water, that disappeared in seconds.