dolphins are canceled

So there I was, toe to toe with Mark Healey in Montauk, NY of all places, telling him how I rented a surfboard for the first time in my life and caught a few fun little waves in Nantucket, Massachusetts, home of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame. It all seemed harmless enough: me in my trunks cross-stepping around in some mushy 2-footers on a rented 8-foot soft top, novelty surf box ticked. Call me, Ishmael. Just adding a few more gallons of h20 to my sliding over the “watery parts of the world.” Healey seemed entertained by my silly folly.

“Lotta white sharks over there,” he said.

I knew there were a lot of white sharks in Cape Cod and Nantucket, I’ve seen the news, but ya know, I wasn’t worried — in my experience, most conversations around here start out about surfing but end up about shark headlines  — especially when my wife is involved. She’s a (recovering) journalist who can’t help but probe and question everything, and finds shark conversations especially interesting. I was quite unnerved when she would read me the shark attack file of each surf spot in Northern California I would surf regularly during our courtship.

Hearing Mark Healey, a dude who is easily in the top five of gnar ocean dudes on any list, and swims with sharks for fun all the time, say there are a lot of sharks somewhere you just surfed is kinda spooky. I was glad to be having these conversations after my freezing cold bareback surf in the dark, seal infested waters off Nantucket. I now understand why Taj Burrow just straight up refuses to talk about sharks. Period. He will walk away from you if they come up.

You can imagine my wife’s enthusiasm as we stood there sipping June Shines at Whalebone Magazine’s “Surf Thing”, sun dipping into the beautiful Montauk bay, Lily Meola serenading the audience with her warm vocals, talking with Mark Healey about sharks. A dude who literally touches them on the snout on purpose. She was in heaven. And loved hearing about how even he was fascinated by the growing numbers in the unassuming land of Nantucket, MA. I was busy pulling a Taj Burrow, trying to get the conversation back around to the hijinx of their early Quiksilver days (we were now talking with Lisa Anderson, Reef Mcintosh and Healey) being driven around the East Coast on surf shop tours by an iconic old Quiksilver bus driver named “Mo Daddy.

Instead, the conversation is back to sharks. Healey is explaining how he’s learned they aren’t all that different from people. They have personality traits just like us. You can infer a lot about them by watching them closely — much the same way you wouldn’t approach a guy who walks into a bar with a bandaged hand holding a broken bottle. That shark with the chunk of his forehead and pectoral fin missing might not be the one who’s gonna let ya grab his dorsal fin for a ride.

But then things got quiet and Healey said something surprising after my wife brought up dolphins. “Yeah, they’re cute, but they might be the real thugs of the sea,” he said.

My wife couldn’t handle it. “What do you mean?” Her famous line.

“Well, I have a friend who got a new orifice from a dolphin,” he says. “Stitches and all.”

Suddenly everything we knew about our beloved aquatic mammals had changed. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say there was no consent. Makes you wonder about that old wives tale…why do sharks disappear when dolphins are around?—Travis Ferré

[Above artwork: Untitled (Fought Like a Shark), 1998 by Raymond Pettibon]