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Many days, they simply swim past, with only a fin bobbing up and down. Some days, though, you'll see a sizeable portion of their bodies as they splash their "flukes", or back fins, on the water. If you're lucky, you'll even catch them on those rare, playful occasions when they jump completely out of the water in a dramatic flip. My family revels in spotting the Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphins as they swim by. Both of our most memorable dolphin-watching moments have been caught on video. A few years ago, my father-in-law miraculously taped a dolphin flipping several feet out of the water. We'd never seen anything like it before and we haven't seen anything like it since. The other time, on a cruise on the tall ship Jolly Rover out of Lewes, we came on a school of dozens of dolphins playing off the point of Cape Henlopen State Park. Because we were under sail, the dolphins moved within just a few yards of the ship, giving the 50 passengers on board a lengthy, up-close view. One moment not caught on tape occurred last summer in the aftermath of one of August's many tropical storms and hurricanes. A teenage boy boogie boarding in Bethany Beach got the shock of a lifetime when, as he caught a wave, a dolphin almost brushed him as it swam through the wave. It scared the living daylights out of that kid, who thought for sure those fins belonged to something far more menacing than a dolphin. Of course, the one time we were really looking for dolphin, during the annual Mid-Atlantic Coastal Dolphin Count, we didn't spot a single one during our two-hour tour of duty at Fenwick Island State Park. Interested in Dolphin gifts and collectibles? Follow these links for a more in-depth look at the Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphin, aka "Tursiops truncatus". Dolphin Home Page | What are Dolphins? | Dolphin Communication | Dolphin Biology
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From the Webmaster: One of our family's favorite pasttimes when the water warms up in summer is watching for the Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphin, which can be seen nearly every day a hundred or so yards off the coast from Lewes, Delaware south to Ocean City, Maryland.