The Shape of Days

May 27, 2005. 1445. 25°42′47″ N., 80°12′24″ W.

Cap’n Bob returns to the boat with news that a deal has been struck; the owners of the dock will let him keep his boat there over the coming hurricane season if he pays to have their pilings replaced in the fall. At a thousand bucks a pop, that’s going to be an expensive slip, but I guess it’s cheaper than finding someplace else. The lesson here is that boat ownership is expensive.

We cast off like we’ve been doing it our whole lives, letting go the fore and aft lines handsomely and without any fuss. We’ve only been aboard for two days, but already I can feel us becoming a crew. Sort of.

From high atop the flybridge comes an order: The skipper is hungry. We sprint below and forward into the galley, and assemble sandwiches without breaking anything or puncturing the hull. I deliver the Captain’s lunch to him on the bridge, then return below to scarf something for myself.

One ham sandwich with plenty of horseradish heavier — we eat simply but well aboard the Albacore — I return to the bridge to find it all abuzz with excitement. There are porpoises off the bow, the Captain tells me. I grab the binoculars and look sharp. He’s wrong. It’s not a porpoise at all. It’s a dolphin. He’s dead ahead of us, about twenty yards out. He flings his body into the air as if trying to get our attention, and he’s beautiful.

I drop the binoculars on the console and sprint to the bow pulpit, craning my neck over the side. Sure enough, there he is: An Atlantic spotted dolphin is surfing our bow wave just portside of our keel. Stenella frontalis, they call him, distinguished from his larger bottlenosed cousin by being somewhat smaller and having distinctive spots on his underbelly. This one keeps up with our eight knots easily, propelled by powerful strokes of his tail. Every other stroke he turns over on his left side, looking up at me and showing me the yellow-brown spots under his chin. I wave at him. He stares up at me. He swims along with us for a minute, barely exerting himself, then dives under us. I run to the afterdeck in time to see him surface in our wake, flipping through the air as if waving goodbye.

That must have been, I realize belatedly, what I heard that first night, that sound I couldn’t recognize. It was a clicking, ticking sound, like Velcro being pulled apart slowly. It must have been a dolphin somewhere out in the harbor, X-raying our boat with his sonar. I wonder if it was the same one. I wonder if he recognized us. I wonder if he’ll remember me, that funny pink walking thing that peered down through the waves at him that time.

This post is part of a series. You can read the whole thing here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

• Encounter at sunrise
• Times shifts all opinion pieces to the left
• and other stories you thought were fiction">The brain that ate Cleveland
  and other stories you thought were fiction