Face to Face with Wild Dolphins, Ashton Nichols

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Face to Face with Wild Dolphins
Ashton Nichols

In January of 2003, a colleague and I took a group of students to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands: Los Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles, as the Spanish sailors and the whalers used to say. One afternoon, our ship was motoring toward Gardner’s Bay on Española when we came upon our first full pod of Pacific bottlenose dolphins. We had seen single or small groups of dolphins in the wake of our bow throughout the week, but this was a pod of at least a hundred animals: adults and juveniles, swimming, leaping, and rolling, not following our boat but making their way as an organized group around the northern edge of the island. We were just within sight of land when the captain sounded the depth for us: we had over half mile of ocean, a thousand meters, beneath us. One of the students suddenly shouted, “Can we swim with them?”—and the captain just as suddenly told us to get our swimsuits, masks and snorkels.

He maneuvered our hundred-foot research ship in a wide, curving arc that intercepted the edge of the pod and cut off a dozen or so dolphins from the larger group. They seemed slightly disoriented at first, and their swimming slowed from a breakneck beeline to small circles, still rolling and surfacing, as though they would stay in this area for a while. At that point the captain literally yelled “Jump,” and we went off the starboard side of the boat into the sea. At that, the dolphins spooked. These ocean mammals were not Marine Land trained, after all; every one of them was a wild creature. As fast as we were swimming, they darted ahead of us and disappeared deep until they rejoined the larger pod. The zodiac picked up a dozen of us who had jumped and, once back on board the ship, the captain gave chase again. This time he broke the pod almost in half and carved a large circle to the left around the smaller group of animals. This second time, the hearty souls in our snorkel group clambered into two zodiacs and gave chase until we were literally in the midst of this leaping group of dolphins.

Once in the water for the second time, the first thing that startled me was the sound. I could hear clicks and beeps and long, drawn-out echoes all around me, coming from every side except above, especially loud directly beneath me. However, I could see nothing except the sapphire blue water turning black in the depths and the distance. Then, all of a sudden, a ten-foot-long, thousand pound Delphinidae raced up from directly beneath me and turned to show me his stomach for only a few seconds before he whizzed past, no more than ten feet from my right side. My heart stopped, my breath caught, I spluttered into my snorkel, and I lost sight of him in an instant. Then I recovered, and I decided to stop swimming and simply tread water. The dolphin vocalizations would fade and then get stronger, so the pod seemed clearly to be staying in our area. Every time I took a gulp of air and dove straight down as deep as my lungs would let me, the sounds would get louder and louder.

By using this method of falling and then rising, I saw one bottlenose at a distance, rolling to the surface. Then, two more swam up underneath me, this time facing stomach to stomach themselves and darting even closer to me than had the large dolphin before them. When the pair brushed by me, I could feel the pressure of their bodies against the water, and I felt that if I had reached out my arm I might have touched them. I was startled and elated and maybe even a little afraid, and I was breathing so hard I felt light-headed. Suddenly, the clicks and beeps and the high whining stopped. I figured I must be out of the pod now, so I surfaced to find the zodiac. It was much farther away than I realized, so I decided I had better start swimming. Face down, I swam slowly and steadily, still using my snorkel, still peering hard into the aquamarine blue sea that faded to black in a wide circle all around me.

Without any warning, I heard the loudest dolphin sound I had heard that afternoon, or ever in my life for that matter: a high whine, click-click, double-beep, double-beep-beep that rose once again from straight down below me—but I could still see nothing. When the dolphin at last appeared, he was swimming much more slowly than the others. At first he scared me, since his motion seemed more like a shark than a mammal. But he rose beak-first directly below me, rolled slowly from one side to the other, moved literally beside me, and rolled his entire body to the right so that I could see first his blowhole, then his beak, and then his bold left eye, black as night but shining brightly in the dappled light only two feet from me and two feet beneath the ocean’s surface. We were both moving, he much faster than I, but this time it was clear that he was looking at me, and I at him, if only for those memorable few instants. I won’t say that our eyes met—that would be far too melodramatic—but I will say that we were looking at one another, and I will add that we could see each other very clearly. Our look must have lasted three or four seconds. Then he was gone, and I rose to the surface silenced and stunned.

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Ashton Nichols is a professor of English at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in Romanticism, nineteenth-century literature, literature and the environment, and nature writing. He is also a founding faculty member of Dickinson in the Galápagos, a program that takes Dickinson students and faculty to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. Previous publications include scholarly books and articles on Wordsworth, Darwin, and other subjects, as well as his own poetry. His current research explores the relationship between literature and natural history in the century before On The Origin of Species.