Dolphin Address 26
June 25th 2005
We thought: ‘Two dolphins, how can we miss?’ But there is a lot of sea around the peninsular of Crozon and nobody could tell us anything, except for some rapid-fire French. On a French website we learned that the dolphins separated and on the quay of Camaret finally someone knows that sometimes a dolphin swims into the harbor at high tide. A few times we posted for a few hours at a forest of jingling yacht masts, where pre-tanned, part-time seadogs showed off their boating skills between floating pontoon’s to nervously giggling spouses.
It seems like this closely knit chain of restaurants has acquired the monopoly on chilled soft drinks. It is sweltering hot.
In the harbor groups of fish up to 20 cm. make flight eddies with powerful tail strokes under low over flying large seagulls. We feel discouraged; find no sympathy in these unintelligible people that seem to murder all small life forms for a free bite.
We decide to go and search one peninsular lower for Cap Sizun, where, according to the French site, both dolphins have swum in May. It becomes a scalding hot quest with many vague leads until a credible lady directs us to Pointe Bresselec.
From the parking place we look a very steep 100 meter down. A goat’s path stands out perilously against a deadly depth. I stumble fine sharp gravel into my knee and slam my hands into sharp grass.
At the final water we see a bottlenose dolphin swim in between the moored out boats. To judge by the dorsal fin this cannot be Dony. We ask fishermen but do not understand their sparse replies. A French couple is mucking about on the iron ladderette, but shies away from our question: ‘How is this dolphin called?’
We decide to change into our gear, so first up again, park the bus illegally on a lower fisher mans parking, wrap up in heavy sweat, down again and with that ardently longed for sigh of relief into the Wet.
Now I have been weighing around a 100 kilo’s for quite a few years and my plunge would have alerted every wild friendly dolphin within a kilometers radius. Not this one.
I swam closer between the boats and saw how much it suddenly was startled by my presence. It looked as if this dolphin was not used to swimmers at all. It did not come to us in curiosity, just kept hanging around some fishing boats. When I dived deeper it exploded. It made the water swirl with long thin eddies and many bubbles that made the water white. It vocalized continually with fast, exited whistles and rushed in random angles around us, jumping high out of the water many times.
A boatful of fishermen starts shouting in all kinds of French to me. I choose not to understand. The dolphin makes biting moves towards us. Verena wants out and I lost my fun as well. With the waterwing I manage to keep some distance. Then off with the mono and up the ladder. This is very different from fun.
We talk about this all evening. Then the hatchet falls again: rather in Ireland without a dolphin then here with this unintelligible psycho. Tomorrow we take the ferry from Roscoff to Rosslare.
Jan Ploeg,
Brittany, June 25th 2005
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