Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

So, after half an hour's hard sailing out of Albufeira, my daughters and I saw some dolphins. Frankly, I was terribly unimpressed. All they did, really, was swim about our boat a bit, and leap up and down in a random way that clearly wasn't choreographed properly, despite their alleged intelligence. None of them even swam right up to the boat and clapped and did that clicky noise thing like Flipper used to do.

[Patrick Thistle]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

I saw dolphins in a boat trip off Abersoch last week. They were charming.

[My Name Is Ian]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

You see them off the coast down here, very occasionally. People really lose their shit whenever they're spotted.

[Kevin S]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

Probably just as well Rogin couldn't decipher the dolphin's conversation.

Hey bro, who's on the boat? Attenborough or some other dude we should put a show on for?

Nah, just some twat tourist with his daughters. Save it for later.

[Jah Womble]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

They're dolphins. What do you want them to do, rustle up cocktails and a hot buffet?

[Bored Of Education]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

I have been impressed by both my dolphin experiences. Firstly, and - in retrospect - not very humanely, I swam with them and they are very good propulsion devices and friendlier than, say, a cat. Their skin has a texture of a wet eraser.

The second was when I saw them off the harbour of the Welsh Newquay. With fish and chips, a couple of cans of Fosters and a lovely sunset to accompany it, it was one of my and my wife's most romantic dinners. Even she says so.

[RobM]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

We get them in The Forth from time to time, they're ace, watch them from the beer garden of my local.

[Benjm]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

Like Bored, I've swum with dolphins in a retrospectively non-ideal setting for them and it was, I have to say, very enjoyable at the time. They weren't friendlier than our cat, but it was a first meeting.

I've been on boats sailing offshore when dolphins and porpoises have swum alongside us, sometimes surfacing and jumping on alternating sides of the bow as if playing a game, and it was about my favourite thing of those trips.

The whale watching company in Reykjavik used to have a great leaflet with an illustration suggesting that you'd be walking arm in fluke with the whales, holding matching canes and boaters like Maurice Chevalier. The reality, while impressive, didn't quite match that.

[WOM]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

We did the stingray dive thing in the Caribbean [nailed it on the third pass] a few years ago. I mean, you probably shouldn't, but the stingrays didn't seem too bothered to molest a bunch of tourist in return for some dead fish, hand-fed to them. Win-win, I guess.

[WOM]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

My Name Is Ian wrote: You see them off the coast down here, very occasionally. People really lose their shit whenever they're spotted.

We see them off the beach in Florida and North Carolina and carry on like we've spotted mermaids. It's still pretty cool when you spot them behaving exactly as you'd imagine they would...all dolphin-like.

[tracteurgarcon]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

Dolphins are okay but Humpbacks (in Hervey Bay, Australia)and Orcas (Victoria Island, Canada) are where it's at.

Both of them amongst the most amazing experiences of my life.

[Various Artist]

Dolphins - lazy wet tossers

I missed my first ever opportunity to see humpback whales with my own eyes last October, from Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa. I was suffering that day with some kind of virus or food poisoning and my stomach felt like a tumble dryer, so I wasn't in the best condition for watching the wildlife. I managed to walk along the boardwalks from the car-park to the big marker stone at the cape, then came over all faint and vomity again and had to go and lie down in the minibus with my hands over my face. I literally couldn't even raise my head to look shortly afterwards when the others in my group were standing just outside the bus pointing excitedly to the horizon, where the humpbacks were (apparently) breaching in full view.
It's fair to say this is a continuing source of rather bitter regret.

Had decent views of southern right whales at Hermanus a bit further along the SA coast soon afterwards, though, where there's deep-water channels right offshore and hence it's one of the whale-watching capitals of the world. Naturally though they reserved their best show in the harbour for ten minutes after I'd left the seafront to go and buy another memory card for my camera, which I learned about when returning a little later and passing the ladies I'd been standing alongside there previously, who were full of praise for the matinee performance that I'd so adroitly just failed to catch.

I seem to remember, like Bored, seeing dolphins off New Quay too once upon a time, and I'm sure I occasionally used to glimpse them in the bay at Aberystwyth around sunset.
Have swum with them (not the same ones) briefly in the Bay of Islands at the northern end of New Zealand, though the uncharitable fuckers refused to hang around or make concession to the fact that my open-water swimming skills are comparable to Robert Maxwell's, so in truth I barely saw them while I was flailing about trying to manoeuvre my unwilling flesh more than a yard through the ocean in any direction and simultaneously work out unaided how one is meant to actually breathe through a snorkel only after jumping off the back off the boat. Had a much better view of them bow-riding and otherwise generally leaping and larking about when cruising (me, not them) on Milford Sound a week or two later.