(Unsplash)

Dolphins Speak to Dana

The captain of the sailing team — her name was Dana — was usually the first to arrive at the marina after school. After rigging their small engineless sloops, the team sailed through the wide channel between long rock jetties out to the open ocean where they practiced. Their coach shadowed them in a small outboard-powered skiff.

Dana always heard chatter from the local dolphins as soon as her boat cleared the jetties. It was a sound she heard in her head every time she sailed on those waters. She had discovered her ability to hear dolphins after a “conversation” she had with a young whale she had “met” at Sea World when she was twelve years old. The responses to her many carefully phrased inquiries had convinced her no one else heard the dolphins, so fearing ridicule she never discussed the subject.

This particular afternoon began with nothing more than a little wind-chop roiling the water’s surface. Engaged in a tacking duel with her sparring partner, Dana was concentrating on the changing vectors of the wind shifts and her opponent’s boat when immense, widely-spaced swells began rolling in from the west. When the first hill of green water passed under her hull, rolling her small sloop back and forth, her concentration dissolved. She looked seaward and saw the next swell already eclipsing the horizon. A pod of several dolphins broke the surface of the wave and raced towards her. A moment…