Our friend from the Netherlands is staying with us, and we go for an evening walk along the cliffs by the river. I make a quick scan for dolphins. “Dolphins!” he says.”Where?” my wife replies. “Calling to them,” he adds. “Dolphins!” We walk on, maybe no more than a hundred metres, and then I spot some by the cliffs on the north side, heading downriver—one, two, three dolphins. We watch them come towards us, cutting across the edge of the sandbar, before they go past, heading further south. We go on to the end of our usual walk, pausing a little longer at the turnaround than we usually do; and in that time we see another pod on the other side of the river by the tree where all the night herons roost—one, two swishing around in the flatwater shallows between the yacht club jetties. “If I had the honour of naming dolphins, I’d call them Pea One, Pea Two and Pea Three,” our friend says. “Peas in a pod.” 

We turn back towards home, and within a couple of hundred metres, there are some more dolphins right in the armpit of the river—right where it bends. We can see their tails—they look to be fishing—maybe one, two, even three. “Could be the same ones. But usually if they’re heading downriver they won’t turn around and come back again.” So we’ve either seen three groups in one outing (highly unusual), or two with one group behaving very unusually—whether they’re all part of the same overall pod (they’re not usually that spread out) or different ones.

We thank the kwilena the dolphin…and our friend.