May 6, 2013
Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
I wish this had happened to me, but these people belong to
my sailing club, and if I claim it as my story, I’m gonna be busted.
They lived aboard their sailboat in the same marina as me,
two slips down. They report that one morning about 4AM they were awakened by a
loud sound reverberating through the hull of their boat. For those of you who
haven’t slept on a sailboat, if you flipped it upside down and took the keel
off, it would be shaped somewhat like a bell. Things that bump into the hull
make magnified sound. So when their hull rang like a bell, he grabbed a
flashlight and got up to see what was going on.
What he found was a group of dolphins hunting sheepshead.
Sheepshead are fish with hard beaks for mouths. They hang around in marinas and
eat the barnacles that grow on the seawalls and the pilings. So what happened?
His boat was in a dolphin’s way, so when the dolphin needed
the boat to out of his way, he just whapped the boat with his tail! Those
dolphins are very strong, and the boat moved.
The dolphin hunted in the marina for several nights before
moving on.
That is the biggest noise I’ve heard of animals making on
boat hulls … but not the only one. The first marina I lived in was salt water.
When I went to sleep in the v berth (the bow of the boat) in the summer, I
could hear faint clicking sounds -- little shrimp eating the algae off the
hull. Thanks, guys! Then I moved my boat to a marina in a river six miles from
the Gulf. Now I frequently hear louder clicking, day and night. That sound is
crabs – eating the algae off the hull. Thanks again, guys!
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