The Orange County Register is reporting that a dolphin leapt out of the ocean, into a boat, and onto a woman’s lower extremities, breaking her ankles. They’re smart, they’re much nastier than Madeleine L’Engle led you to believe, and they are absolutely coming for us.
According to the Register, Dirk and Chrissie Frickman were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary and Father’s Day on June 21 by sailing around Dana Point Harbor with their teenage children. A pod of dolphins swam next to their boat. It was all as idyllic as a Lisa Frank backpack, until suddenly it was not.
A dolphin leaped out of the water, hit the rail of their boat and flopped right inside with the family.
At first, it might have resembled a wacky Sea World trick, or a fun Flipper moment.
But it got messy. Bloody, scary and messy.
“It hit my wife and knocked her over, and punched my daughter,” Dirk Frickman recalled.
Luckily, no one got knocked out of the boat, he said.
“I had this 350-pound dolphin in my boat,” Frickman said. “There was no way to get it off the boat.”
The Frickmans say the frantic dolphin flopped onto Christie’s legs, snapping her ankles. It thrashed around the boat, spraying blood in every direction from cuts on its nose and tail as they sped back towards the harbor.
Dirk Frickman told the Register he and a Harbor Patrol deputy who met the family back at the harbor dumped water on the dolphin every 30 seconds to keep it alive before eventually wrapping chains around it and managing to lower it back into the water. There is video, allowing all of us to see, for future reference in our nightmares, the blood all over the boat:
Sergeant DJ Haldeman of the Dana Point Harbor Patrol told the Guardian that he has no idea why the dolphin might have jumped out of the water. ““I don’t know what was in the water, but something must have scared it out,” he told the paper.Christie Frickman is reportedly recovering, according to the Register; she has torn ligaments in one ankle as well as breaks in both.
While we don’t mean to make any implications here, and while it’s also entirely possible that this poor creature was just frightened, disoriented and hurt, it’s also fairly well known that dolphins are absolute dicks.
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Screengrab via YouTube/OC Register