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The Dolphins see us as a food source so we dont scare the mothers and the littlies away, if anything we attract them, its quite common to see the littlies swim away from the group and get rounded up real quick from a couple of the adults.
Many years ago when I was a Deckhand we fished the same area for about 3 weeks and every day we would anchor behind the same small island to get shelter from the weather.A group of about 4 adults always hung around the boat to get the scraps from when we cleaned our nets.I started saving small Mackeral as they love them,(in those days we were aloud to keep them onboard, but not now), over about 1 week I fed 2 of the dolphins each day, by the end of the week I could slap the fish on the surface of the water and they would take them from my hand..and they would wait until I had let the fish go before they swam off..It was AMAZING..
Those Days I could only afford the old Kodak wind-on camera and the photos dont do it justice as it had no zoom and was a very cheap camera.
I have done it 1 time since then in 25yrs, but for a 17y/old, it was then and think it is still to this day one of the highlights of my time at sea.
Cheers Ean
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I fish out of Forster once a month and we usually go out on Friday night heading out to the five mile reef or south down towards Seal Rocks. On nights when the phosphorescence is high it is amazing to see what looks like torpedoes heading at great speed towards the boat. They are dolphins. The common dolphins not the larger grey bottle nose ones that you see close to shore and in WallisLake.
When they get close they jump out of the water to the height of the deck and look right at you. You can almost touch them. Unbelievably nimble and graceful creatures.
Another time I watched a pod of bottlenose dolphins at the break-wall that had a huge school of Australian Salmon hemmed right up onto the wall. They wanted to go out with the run-out tide but everytime one of them tried to make a run for it the dolphins would cut it off and it was dinner in a flash.
They did this all afternoon until the tide changed and the salmon then went crazy rushing against the run-in tide to get out to sea.
As for flying fish I have seen them on a big swell use the pressure wave in front of the swell to glide well over 200 metres. They were being chased by big tuna and as it turned out a 100KG plus marlin - it wouldn't bite on our lures and skip baits though
