Poohdog and the Dolphins
- Capt. Greg Handal
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
It was back in the late nineties, before I started chartering. I was looking forward to my first summer off since 1981. In 1982, when I was 13 years old, I got my first summer job, thanks to neighbor and friend, Mr. Jim Albergotti, as a gopher on a construction site. I had gone to school and worked summers ever since then. I had gotten my undergraduate degree in psychology and worked for a couple of years with the SC Department of Mental Health while pursuing a masters degree in teaching special ed. I taught summer school after my first year teaching while my wife finished her special education degree. Upon her graduation, we moved to James Island and taught in the Charleston area.
Well summer rolled around after our first year in Charleston and, like I said, I was excited to take the summer off. As luck would have it, I got a bad cold or the summer flu just before school let out, complete with a high fever. We were living in our first house in Seaside Plantation which had a boat landing as a communal amenity. I was bound and determined to enjoy myself that first day off, no matter how I felt. We packed a cooler with Gatorade, put lawn chairs and our pup, Poohdog, in the back of the pickup truck and headed to the boat landing in our neighborhood to hang out on the dock in the sunshine and enjoy the marsh scenery.
When we had been there an hour or so, we saw some dolphins swimming towards us up Seaside Creek. Poohdog was on the floating dock and had yet to see them. It was mid tide and there was a sandbar connected to the creek bank directly across from the floating dock and it was exposed.
A little about Poohdog, boats, and her relationship with dolphins. She was an avid sailor and boater ever since her forced first sailboat ride in 1991. And by "forced", I mean she was the one doing the forcing. We were at my parent's house on Lake Murray, just outside of Columbia, SC. My wife and I took off on our sunfish sailboat which is a little, 14 foot board boat, and Pooh was left ashore, much to her chagrin. She started whimpering and barking and then she charged down the hill, leapt in the water and swam out to us. I grabbed her collar and pulled her aboard. She did remarkably well standing on a slick deck while we sailed around an hour or two. We had a good wind, so the boat was heeling and going through choppy water and she never slipped off nor did she stop smiling. She was on boats with us from that point on. As far as dolphins were concerned, she had never seen one until we moved to James Island. When we were sailing or powerboating and a dolphin came up, Poohdog went bezerk. She'd bark and bark and whine and bark. She had the same reaction when we would pass crab pots, so we hypothesized that she mistook those floating pieces of styrofoam for dolphins.
Back to our first day of vacation. Those dolphins continued to make way towards us until Poohdog finally noticed them. The barking began. And continued. These two dolphins had the nerve to invade her creek! The dolphins made it to the dock and proceeded to beach themselves on the sandbar that was only ten yards away. They were strand feeding, a behavior in which dolphins force baitfish onto a beach or a bank and then roll out of the water to eat the fish. Reportedly it is a behavior indigenous to dolphins in South Carolina and Georgia. Here's a video that I took in 2017 of dolphins strand feeding on Morris Island https://photos.app.goo.gl/LGrFme7TFxbC5gG9A
Well the sight of two dolphins totally exposed ten yards away was almost too much for Poohdog. She barked and yelped and twisted her head to the side as she did so. I think she was nearing cardiac arrest. Then she had taken their presence as long as she could stand, she leapt off the dock into the creek, paddled the short distance to the bank and reached the dolphins. The dolphins had completely ignored her up to this point, but she put a paw on one of them and they immediately rolled back into the water and swam away with Poohdog in hot pursuit. We called to her and called to her when we could catch our breaths from laughing. She finally made a u-turn and swam back to us.
After that event, I was worried that she might jump from the boat when she saw dolphins, but she never did, though they still drove her crazy. As did the crab pots. She continued to enjoy sailing and going to the beach and Morris Island. I had gotten her in the late eighties when I was a junior at the University of South Carolina (she was contraband in the dorm!), and she hung around until our son was born in 2006. She was 17 and a half when we had to put her down. We had another dog during Pooh's lifetime, and when we had to put that dog down, I told my wife that when I would have to do the same with Pooh, I'd never do it again. She was a great dog. My first dog. And my last dog.
