Today I had a dream come true. I had a dolphin come check me and my divers out while we did dive flexible surface skills on the surface of open water dive number two.
We were buoyant (floating) on the surface just about finished with one more student and a dive master candidate, Tyre Eggert, about to do the surface navigation to us, when one of the open water students, Abigail, said there is a dolphin. I scanned the surface to see where. “Sorry I don’t see it, where?”. Below us she says. I look down and the motionless dolphin is spy hopping us, prostrate and unmoving and upside down from below, as we float on the surface.
I look to the diver Chelsie and Tyre as she is about to set her compass and I say to the rest around me above the stagnant surveying dolphin below, "I guess we are making our decent."
As a group we decend to a depth of 15’ to see this inquisitive mammal. It is still stagnant ipossibly sick. Who knows I have never experienced this. It just lingers like a languid log. I dolphin kick to it and twirl and even spy hop. It turns to me and looks confused. I make an audible sound through the pit of my chest and he reacts. Moving capriciously, erratically. Confused. He bolts about circling us. Then he survey’s us and disappears as he surfaces for a breath of air. We surface to find Tyre and Chelsie navigate their way to us. Keshaun Liburd is on the boat with his camera in hand videoing the dolphin as he makes another decent to join us.
We all decend together and for the next 25 minutes we have the most intimate gentle and inspirational moment of our diving history. I am somewhere around dive 10,000. They are on dive two. Tyre dive 200 and? Who cares. This is magic. The best dive of my life in 15 feet.
The dolphin examines each of us. He is stagnant at time floating and neutral, demonstrating buoyancy control, back finning, spy hopping. Even proper breath hold diving procedures. It is miraculous. It is his nature.
I have taught these five dolphin divas, as they are now called on our what’s App chat, how to properly dive down breath holding. How to streamline and how to dolphin kick. Now this cetacean dive master has shown me up and inspired my students to move more freely through the water with no hands and just fins. The dolphin smiles at us and squeaks in his aquatic tongue.
I think he wants to learn to scuba too because none of us need to surface to breathe like he does.
Tyre has met this dolphin several times. He becomes almost intimate as they dance together like old friends. He has been named Rudy the dolphin by some locals. Abigail has become the most intimate as they almost embrace in a touch and dancing too with a new under water friend. I am always watchful on my dolphin divas, my mermaids in training as they each have an intimate moment Rudy, who comes to each of them smiles and squeaks.
His body is scarred perhaps from playing in the harbour beneath props of unseeing captains. I have seen him in the harbour a few times. He has a round wound on the right side aft of his dorsal fin. There is white matter spewing from this open lesion we are all concerned as to what spear made this wound, by whom and why?
One last moment with Rudy, Abigail upside down prostrate to the seabed stairing into the eyes of daring dolphin as he slowly poops and we all laugh silently in our regs. I swim to her to show the falling fecal matter descending towards her in the slow gravity of the aquatic realm. So Abigail swims away.
With one last look at us Rudy swims away so that I can complete the skills required for open water dive two with these five new dolphin divas.
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