I watch wild dolphins at the Jersey Shore, and every summer I learn something new

I’d been looking, carefully scanning the early season waves at Cape May Point. But the little boy saw them first.

Abandoning his sandcastle-in-progress, he scrambled to his feet.

“Pop-pop, Mom-mom! Look!” he called out.

His grandfather, sitting in the beach chair a few yards back, stopped in mid-sunscreen smear:

“What the ….?” the man said in disbelief. “Marie, look in the water. What is that?”

The woman next to him, the little boy’s “Mom-mom,” put down her paperback.

There, in the sun-sparkled surf of midmorning, was a fin, then two more, rising up atop crescents of sleek slate gray and diving down under the waves. And gracefully surfacing again. Glistening.

“Oh my God,” the woman said. “It’s dolphins!”

A runner paused to watch in wonder. So did a couple on a shoreline stroll.

I just sat back, finally, and relaxed. Never mind what the calendar said: Summer was truly here. The dolphins had returned.

To me, summer at the Jersey Shore means seeing the dolphins. Only one year, I missed them. It turned out to be kind of a sad summer. The rest of that year wasn’t too great either. To some cultures, dolphins are protectors. I could tell you I’m not superstitious, but I’d be lying. I’ve tried hard to never miss the dolphins again.

Mind you, wild dolphins weren’t always part of my summers. I’m a blow-in by Philly standards; I’ve only been going to the South Jersey Shore for the past 20 or so years. When I was kid, we never saw dolphins cavorting at Coney Island or Brighton Beach.

But the first time I saw them at Cape May Point, it felt like magic. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. My kids grew up seeing dolphins. Once on an ocean kayak, a pod surrounded them, close enough to touch. They weren’t afraid. “It was cool,” they told me.

We’ve also introduced lots of friends and family to the dolphins. They never believe that they’re going to see them — especially not while sitting on a beach in New Jersey. But then there they are. And our naysayers start to believe a bit in magic, too.

Over time, I’ve gotten to learn more about the Shore dolphins. Like us, they return each summer, and if the fates are kind, they bring back their families, too, or add to them in these waters.

The dolphins we see around our area of the Jersey Shore are part of the Northern Migratory Coastal Stock of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. They travel as far north as New York in the warm water months and as far south as North Carolina in the colder months.

Melissa Laurino, a marine biologist with the Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center whom I met a couple years ago, has gotten to know lots of them. She collects data on over 510 dolphins for submission to the Mid-Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin Catalog, a collaborative research effort curated through Duke University. That includes photographs; every dolphin’s dorsal fin is different.

May and June are calving prime time for the Shore’s returning dolphins, some who mated here a year ago, according to Laurino. Some of the babies and their moms have already been spotted on her research center cruises, like Ivory, named for her white-marked dorsal fin and her calf. Just-born dolphins are jet black with “fetal folds,” she said; they have to grow into their skin. Their dorsal fins are floppy, and if that wasn’t cute enough, they look about as graceful in their early swimming as a toddler learning to walk.

They’re also very small.

“About the size of a Primo hoagie,” said Ryan Haines, a guide with Thunder Cat Dolphin Watch, a cruise that operates out of Wildwood Crest.

Laurino, meanwhile, has been noting the return of lots of familiar dolphins, like Plateau, named for her trapezoid-shaped dorsal. Some just have numbers, like 245, one of Laurino’s favorites. Born with a hump-like scoliosis, swimming takes more effort for her. But she birthed a healthy calf in 2020, and both are back this year.

Dolphins are devoted mothers, caring for their calves the first two or three years of their lives.

They can also be party animals. Triscuit, back this summer, and his buddies go cruising for dolphin hookups like human dudes hitting Shore nightspots.

“We call him Cape May’s most eligible bachelor,” joked Laurino, who also teaches at Stockton University.

So how do you get to see dolphins from the Shore? Location matters. Lots of people swear by Stone Harbor. Cape May Point has usually been lucky for me. So are midmornings when the sun still has a touch of gentleness, or late afternoons when ghost crabs scurry across the sand and shadows grow long.

You have to be patient. That did not come easy for me; it never has. A whole day can go by, and you’ll see nothing. But then another day, in the middle of some reverie, a cascade of fins will graciously roll up to reward you from the sea.

You can’t count on the stuff about dolphins as protectors either. Expecting luck is logic for fools. I’ve seen many dolphins in the past several years and still saw more loss personally than I once thought was possible.

But for some cultures, dolphins have also meant rebirth, new beginnings. Who knows? The longer I live, the more I realize the less I know about a lot of things.

So this summer, once again, I’ll take my chances. You can do worse than spend a day on a quiet beach, contemplating waves and tides, and, if you’re so blessed, be visited by dolphins.