Socorro Island, 2006. Here I was, single and unattached, and living the bachelor’s dream. I was sailing to exotic places, meeting women, getting free meals, having a roof over my head and, at the same time, earning a bit of money to save up for a rainy day. Or so people thought. Real life is a little different. I had to work my butt off 16 hours a day on the boat that provided my board and lodging in Mexico, and I was only meeting females of the animal variety.
One seemingly ordinary day, while I was setting up a buoy for a dive site, I fell in to the water with my dive gear. Captain Dave called out: “Dolphins!” For me, it was more like, Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen them before.
I was at the surface, looking down in the water when I saw a bottlenose dolphin moving towards me at high speed. What the…? I thought. I was a bit apprehensive because a dolphin, if it wants to, can kill a human being by repeatedly hitting the person with its body. And I have seen dolphins beat the sh*t out of a tiger shark. So when it stopped with its nose two inches in front of mine, I have to admit I got worried.
But then she laid herself in my arms! I carefully stroked her, taking extra care around her eyes and blowhole. She nibbled at my hand with her mouth. I told Dave to give me 10 minutes because I had never seen this kind of behavior from a wild dolphin before. When I had to dive down in order to set the anchor of the buoy, she gracefully flipped her agile body and followed me down. She cocked her head to one side, watching me set the anchor. Then she imitated my movements as I was going back up to the surface. She never left my side.
I asked Dave to go and get the divers because I was not leaving her to go back on the boat. That instant connection during our initial encounter established a routine between us. I would return to Socorro every eight to nine days and resume our underwater courtship, which eventually blossomed into a relationship.
Later that year I met someone else. By early 2007 I was testing the waters to see if a long-distance relationship would work. So here I was, maintaining two affairs, neither one having a clue about the existence of the other. That same year, one of them became my wife. She eventually found out about my other girlfriend—that her skin was as smooth as the inside of my wife’s arm, except that my girlfriend’s nose was bigger.
