Dave, Dolly and the deep sea

A story about an extraordinary friendship between a diver and a dolphin in Shark Bay.

Diving was Dave’s passion. He was a strong swimmer. He had decided at a young age that he would study marine biology and make diving his profession. Dave felt completely at home underwater. To him it was a magical world filled with fascinating, colourful sea creatures.

On a dive in Shark Bay one day, a young dolphin swam upto him and nudged him. It had some fishing net entangled tightly around its beak-like mouth. Dave realised the poor bottlenose dolphin would starve as it was unable to open its mouth to feed.  It swam around him in circles as if to say, “Please help me”. 

Dave gently and patiently untangled the nylon net from the dolphin’s snout. Finally, he used his pen knife to cut it free, making sure to take the nasty piece of net with him, lest some other poor sea creature suffer a similar fate. The dolphin rubbed against him affectionately, emitting a high-pitched squeak almost like a whistle, as if to say, “Thank you for helping me”.

That day, the dolphin accompanied Dave throughout his dive; eventually rising to the surface with him. Leaping out of the water, it flipped its tail as if waving goodbye, before disappearing into the depths of the ocean. 

The next time Dave was diving in the same area, who do you think came to greet him? Dave recognised the young bottlenose dolphin whom he had rescued swimming towards him. When he reached out to her, she came to him unafraid, allowing him to stroke her.  She treated him like a friend and even introduced him to the rest of her pod who accepted him as one of them. They swam around him playfully, occasionally slapping him mischievously with their tails whilst communicating with each other using strange clicks and whistle-like sounds. 

Dave named his newfound dolphin friend Dolly. One day, whilst studying a starfish hiding behind an anemone, Dave’s vision was obscured by a shroud of swirling sand. From the corner of his eye, he spied Dolly with a Sponge on her beak resembling a clown’s nose. His first thought was that she was protecting her snout after the earlier accident with the net. Later, it dawned on him that she was using the sponge to protect her delicate beak from sharp rocks whilst she shovelled through rubble at the bottom of the sea bed, stirring up swirls of sand, exposing hidden barred sand-perch, which she hungrily made a meal of.

“Wow, that’s really smart,” thought Dave. Soon he saw other dolphins in Dolly’s pod adopting the same technique. He was thrilled to have discovered that dolphins are intelligent enough to use the sponge as a tool to avoid getting hurt whilst searching for food.  He wrote a paper on it and called the technique ‘sponging’.

Once, Dave saw the dolphin pod boisterously playing ball with a poor puffer fish, using their noses to toss it amongst themselves. When he swam closer, they tossed it to him. Kind-hearted Dave, let the poor puffer fish swim away to safety, much to the chagrin of the juvenile dolphin gang. 

Whilst chasing a particularly elusive octopus one day, Dave forgot to check the time and stayed underwater for too long. As usual, Dolly was swimming besides him, when suddenly he realised his oxygen tank was running extremely low. Dolly saw him struggling to breathe, flailing his arms and sensed something was wrong. She swam close enough for Dave to grab her dorsal fin and shot up like a torpedo towards the surface with Dave clinging on for dear life. Dolly had sensed the urgency in Dave to come up for air and came to his rescue. Thus Dolly saved Dave from drowning.

He hugged her gratefully in thanks. “You saved me,” he spluttered, still gasping for air. It was as though Dolly had returned the favour for the time Dave saved her.

As if that were not thanks enough, Dolly swam over to Dave, on another one of his diving expeditions with a pearl chain on her snout and pushed it into his hand. “What’s this girl? Where did you find this?” Dave exclaimed stroking Dolly. As if she understood what he was saying, Dolly swam ahead, turning around at intervals to check that Dave was following her and led him to a chest filled with old coins hidden amongst the tall seagrass.

Dave couldn’t believe his eyes. The wood from the old casket had rotted away over the years to reveal the treasure it held. Strewn on the sea floor were gold coins and gems of varied hues sparkling amongst the grains of sand, all hidden by the screen of seagrass. 

Dave had discovered a sunken treasure thanks to Dolly but to him discovering and getting to know Dolly and her dolphin friends was even more valuable. After all, he owed her his life. Theirs was a friendship he cherished more than any treasure. He ensured that a vast sum of money from the treasure was used towards the protection and conservation of dolphins in Shark Bay.