Being the records, both photographic and written, of dolphins I have encountered or known over time.  I will also be adding records of many of the times when I have dreamed of seeing dolphins at a particular place and then found that my dream was precognitive when I actually encountered dolphins at that place the next day.  This is a page in progress, and as I become more or less busy with the important issues of financial survival (i.e. whether or not I’m trapped on a movie set for months on end), I will add pieces.  Most of the pieces concerning dreams will be taken from years of personal journal entries, but along with those, I will be addressing my impressions of the possible structures of these precognitive encounters.  As my knowledge of different world views has expanded, especially in the area of quantum physical realities, so has my list of possibilities.  The pictures at the beginning are a simple timeline of the first few years of the now life-long obsession to understand and eventually communicate with dolphins.  My thanks to the photographers other than myself who took some of these photos.  And my thanks to Alex and John for those years of research and fun with dolphins, orcas, and technology uneasily mixed with seawater.  I hope for a reunion of the minds sometime soon, wunderkinder.  

When I was seven or eight I visited a now-defunct Los Angeles marine park called Marineland, which would figure significantly in my life in at least a couple of different ways.  Elsewhere on this site (see Dolphin Alone excerpt) I mention my “mutant imprinting” theory (tongue only partly in cheek) about that first visit.  By the time I was sixteen, I had already been “imprinted” with the drive to know and understand dolphins.  In the two photos below I’m visiting Marneland shortly after that epiphany.  Mutant Imprinting Countdown = 0+1!

  
   
 

The first two dolphins I ever came to know and love were Pacific white-sided dolphins, kept at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, San Diego, California.  I was the first human being that they came to know and love.  Through Rake and Shy, I learned that dolphins were more than I could have hoped or even imagined them to be.  And through them I learned the terrible cost of captivity for dolphins.  Below are Rake and Shy, in the deplorable environment they had to adapt to after life in the open sea.

  
   
 

After Miami Seaquarium bought Rake and Shy, I called about a job interning for a lab conducting research on dolphin cognition based at Sea World and partially funded through San Diego State University.  I was turned down, because I was not a San Diego State student, but instead attended the University of California at San Diego.  Then, a week after completing an intensive language course in Europe, I was standing in line for a ferry to one of the Greek islands when I made friends with a girl next to me, who turned out to be the babysitter of the professor who ran the lab.  He was impressed by the odd coincidence and after a long conversation with him upon my return to San Diego; he let me join the lab.  Below is a young dolphin, Julio, with me at Sea World.  Today he is one of the two dolphins I am now trying to find.

 

  
                 
I worked with another dolphin at Sea World named Clicker, who was both my nemesis and my fiercely loyal playmate, depending on circumstance.  I have been searching for Clicker for the past two years and believe I now know where he may be.              
 
     
         

Below are eight photos taken in British Columbia, Canada, off Hanson Island, one of the many islands in the archipelago off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Alex and I lived and worked in the field with the orcas of the archipelago for two summers.  The first day of our first research season in the field with orcas, we were met with this display of repeated breaching by one of the resident whales.  The black and white photos are the first I ever shot with an SLR camera, and they are in the order of occurrence, left to right.  The whale breaches twice, then swims under our Zodiac, surfaces on the other side, and breaches a third time.  She did this as all the humans on the water began whooping and hollering, including a Japanese film crew in another boat off-camera.  That the whale performed this spectacular behavior was not, I believe, a coincidence, but an acknowledgment, or possibly even a greeting.  When she swam under our boat she looked up at us with frank and gentle curiosity.

   
 

Dr. John Lilly introduced me to Alex Hubbard, and we began over four years of research together, first with the orcas at Marineland, then in the field in Canada.

 

  

Alex and I both felt the same kind of calling to work with cetaceans, and enjoyed any interaction with the dolphins and the orcas at Marineland.

  
       

Lower right- Photo 1:  After hearing an orca pod approaching over researcher Paul Spong’s hydrophones there is a mad dash to the sea from his island lab, with our Zodiac in the lead.

 
               
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Photos 2 and 3:  A female orca from one of the resident pods suddenly breaches, reentering the water with a resounding splash.  I somehow manage to catch her on film while trying to keep my balance in the boat.  We slow to a stop.

         
               
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Photos 4 and 5:  We watch from our now stationary Zodiac as the whale breaches again, closer to us.  Then she begins heading directly toward our boat.

    
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Photos 6 and 7:  The orca begins to dive under our boat, and then she emerges on the other side after eyeing us from below the water’s surface.

    
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Photo 8:  The orca breaches once more, very close to our boat, but makes only a small splash when she lands.  Was she being careful around us?  Her actions were deliberate and intentional, but they were in no way aggressive.  I think she was aware of our frailty.

      8    
               
                           

 

 

 

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