Saturday, January 3, 2009

Met and fed the wild dolphins – Tin Can Bay

The Bear says:

Well, for me this was one of those "peak experiences" of life. Yes, dolphins may have been thoroughly hijacked by the New Agers, but there really is something marvellous and wondrous about these animals.

Hearing that the dolphins usually arrived between about 7AM and 9AM, we made our way down the boat ramp a little bit after 7:00. There were no dolphins yet, but already a crowd of around twenty or thirty people were standing up to their ankles in the sea, under the watchful gaze of a volunteer team of supervisors. As it happened, we were probably only there about five minutes before a dolphin glided in, seemingly out of nowhere, followed by another, and another!

They swam right up to the semi-circle of humans, stopping within about half a metre of our feet, and just waited with us. They spent the next half-an-hour or so lazing about in the shallows, occasionally changing places with each other, or swimming out a little way and then back to shore. These are big, solid animals, with lots of teeth. They were in extremely close proximity to us, and from time to time even made quite sudden movements as they decided to change spots on the beach. Yet I never felt any sense of alarm, and there was no evidence of any in the rest of the crowd either, even from quite small children. I wonder why that is; is it just that in our culture we're well conditioned to think of these animals as friendly and non-threatening? Or is there something deeper and more instinctive going on? There even seemed to me to be a tremendous tranquility in the crowd, unlike what I would have expected from a small horde of tourists.

By the time the nominated feeding time arrived at 8AM, the numbers in and around the shoreline had swelled to about one hundred people. The volunteers now cleared the waters, and we queued up to purchase a single fish each to hand-feed to the visitors. The girl and I were directed down to one of the three, who took the fish from my fingers so daintily and smoothly that I hardly felt it go.

A simply incomparable experience.