Hi Gigi!
Just got in, my legs are burnt to a crisp since it's the first time I've worn shorts in a couple years. Mike's boat motor was missing on one cylinder so we stayed in the intercoastal. Messed around bottom fishing with frozen squid and shrimp. We caught probably 3 dozen catfish. It was a lot of fun getting out on the water and just allowing myself to have a good time.
10 minutes after launching the boat, on our way out to our fishing spot, a dolphin launched itself OUT OF THE WATER about 50 feet from our boat! I've seen hundreds of them roll but this was the first time I've ever seen one clear 3' out of the water in the wild. Even if I had my camera, it happened so fast I wouldn't have gotten a shot. Wish you could have seen it, Gigi. I instantly thought of you.
Isn't that an awesome sight? I love dolphins! Did you hear about this? I read about it on an Abaco Forum.
NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- A quiet cruise Thursday morning on the Intracoastal Waterway left an Ohio couple with a whale of a fish tale to tell -- or maybe that should be dolphin.
Norman and Barbara Howard were riding with their daughter in Montie Henderson's 18-foot center console boat when an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin jumped in with them. The mid-morning encounter occurred north of the North Causeway bridge in New Smyrna Beach.
"We were going under the bridge, and the next thing I knew I had a big old fish on top of us," Howard, 64, said while standing outside Bert Fish Medical Center, where he and his wife were treated and released Thursday afternoon. The couple suffered cuts, bumps and bruises.
While Howard could laugh about the incident a few hours later, when the 8- to 10-foot-long, estimated 400-pound mammal hit, there was nothing funny about it.
His first thought after the dolphin landed in their laps was to get it off. But as he pushed the flapping creature away, it knocked them to the boat's deck.
"I was just trying to get it off my wife," he said.
While, at the same time, he was being smacked by the tail.
"That thing had a good punch," Howard said. "Mike Tyson does not hit that hard."
Using his legs to push, Howard was able to assist Henderson, who grabbed the animal and rolled it off the front of the boat.
Henderson, who is the boyfriend of the Howards' daughter Laura Hall, said the day started uneventfully with the two couples taking a leisurely cruise from the Edgewater boat ramps north up the Intracoastal and into the backwaters near the Quay Assisi subdivision.
"This was their first time in the boat," Hall said of her parents. Barbara Howard had even joked that the marine adventure might put them on one of those funniest home video shows.
"I was pointing out to Buck (Norman Howard) where we had caught a mess of snook," Henderson said.
As they motored south past the Diamond Head condominiums, Henderson said he saw some dolphins ahead. Then just before the bridge "the dolphin came out of the water about three or four feet in front of the boat."
"It jumped about head high, arching across the bow," he said. Henderson said he tried to reverse the boat, but its momentum and the mammal's trajectory intersected.
"It looked like he was chasing bait," the 47-year-old Edgewater resident said.
John Rice, a vacationing Cape Cod commercial fisherman, said he didn't see the impact, but certainly heard it.
"I thought they had hit another boat or maybe a manatee," he said of the Henderson's craft. But when he peered through the bridge pilings, he saw the occupants struggling to roll the creature back into the water.
"I have heard of sharks jumping in boats, but this is the first time I have heard of this," he said from the fishing pier directly adjacent to the bridge.
Dolphin expert Janet Mann, who has studied the marine mammals for 21 years, said it was probably a young animal.
"My guess would be that it was a calf that was either not paying attention or maybe trying to escape something and got spooked," the professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., said. "They don't jump that high unless they're trying to get away from something."
To compound the misadventure, U.S. Coast Guard officials got misinformation and could not find Henderson's boat for more than an hour. They finally spotted the skiff near the Edgewater ramps at Kennedy Park.
Norman Howard said the dolphin encounter was the third mishap he had suffered in three days -- first was a brake line failure, followed by a near accident when a car ahead of him got tangled up with a power line on Wednesday.
"I am going to stay home tomorrow," he said.
mark.johnson@news-jrnl.com
Oh yeah, don't forget the sunscreen!
