So I held onto the dolphin, in the shade, and just tried to keep it comfortable. “They took a while,” according to West, “so they told us to hold onto the dolphin – and since I had the dolphin in my arms, we weren’t going to switch it up. Someone called the nearby Clearwater Marine Aquarium, an authorized rescue facility. There, as West and fellow lifeguard Georgia Toney kept the animal stable on the rescue board, Mattis removed the rest of the stiff nylon rope. With the dolphin freed, the lifeguards set it gingerly on West’s board for the journey closer to shore, guiding it across a wide, deep-water trough and into the shallows where maneuverability would be better. Onlookers were kept back as the calf was assessed. “They’re hoping the adult, possibly the mother, comes back,” read a department tweet. Together, they cut the second line and the crab trap fell away.Ĭlearwater Beach Patrol lifeguards are employees of the city’s Fire and Rescue Department. So he signaled to Scott Mattis, another lifeguard, to bring a knife.
CLEARWATER MARINE AQUARIUM HOURS FREE
He was able to free the line caught on the piling the rope around the animal’s tail, however, was too tight for shears. “So I jumped off, and I was able to stand.” It was, he estimates, between four and five feet deep, on a sandbar that transects the pier about 200 yards out. “I knew I couldn’t cut it from my board,” West said. And every time it would try to swim up to get a breath, it would get yanked back.”Īs adrenaline pumped, he realized he was unsure of the water’s depth. “One line was wrapped around the piling, and the dolphin’s tail was wrapped up in the other line, like six times. Immediately he surmised that the animal he’d seen swimming in circles must have been its panicked mother.Ĭlearwater Beach Patrol lifeguard Justin West. “I paddled out until I got within 20 feet of it,” West recalled, “and I went ‘Oh gosh, this is a dolphin.’” A very, very small dolphin. That sort of thing, unfortunately, happens all the time. He had shears with him a necessary tool for freeing birds entangled in fishing line. He climbed down from his Tower 5 perch, hopped on his rescue board and quickly paddled out to investigate.
He saw a shadow underneath it, but even with binoculars, it was too dark down there to make it out. Using his binoculars, Justin West saw something else: One of the Styrofoam crab trap buoys under the pier was bobbing in an erratic fashion. This one, however, appeared to be swimming in circles. A common sight, as the the sleek, grey marine mammal is indigenous to the coastal Gulf, and the pier stretches more than 1,000 feet offshore. Clearwater Beach Patrol lifeguard Justin West was three hours into his shift Wednesday afternoon when he noticed a bottlenose dolphin in the green water off Pier 60, the elevated tourist and fishing structure.
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