Surfing is dangerous for any number of reasons, though dolphins practicing their WWE moves generally don’t show up on the list. Maybe they should!
Jed Gradisen, Western Australia’s under-14 state surfing champion, was catching some waves at Kalbarri beach when his father Andrew caught an unlikely spectacle on camera: A dolphin leapt majestically from the water and landed on his son. The kid fortunately wasn’t injured, but the animal’s snout punched a hole right through his board. Nature is metal, y’all.
Said young Jed, “In my dreams I wouldn’t dream of anything like that. It was an accident; [the dolphin] was just as amazed as I was.”
Is that so? Then why do dolphins love to clobber surfers? Consider the case of California surfer Thomas Machuca, who earlier this year got 18 stitches after a bottlenose dolphin “slapped” him in the head with its dorsal fin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It8YzouvYLY
Elsewhere on the California coast, Matt Minich was battered in 2015. You can call it clumsiness all you want, dolphin—we know the truth.
But perhaps even more savage than these beatings are the incidents in which dolphins burn surfers by being, you know, way better surfers. Check out how pathetic they’ve made humans in this sport look over the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoCCwJ8cC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YRgaEOwYE4
Brutal. Then again, maybe I’m being too hard on dolphins for their aggressive antics in the surf. Sometimes they do take out one of their own.
Yeah, guess they’re still getting the hang of this whole “ocean” thing.