Diving with Dolphins (Short Film and Original Spoken Word Poetry)

▶️ Watch on 3Speak

About the Poem

Diving with Dolphins is a poem I wrote many moons ago after a very special day’s scuba diving at the end of a weeklong Liveaboard scuba diving trip at the red sea in Egypt.

As we returned from diving open ocean sites such as Daedalus and Elphinstone Reef the captain stopped at a particular reef where he said a resident pod of dolphins often interacted with scuba divers.

The Egyptian boat crew had acted as lookouts and with smiles were shouting at us to gear up as dolphins were only twenty metres from the boat.

I can still remember the excitement as I put on all my gear and did my safety checks with my buddy at the time… I wasn’t to be disappointed.

After jumping in and descending to around ten metres the curious pod of dolphins passed above us at breakneck speed before circling back and swimming past us so close you could feel the backdraft from their powerful fins.

One young especially curious dolphin spent around fifteen minutes turning circles around us, hanging upside down above us and generally showing off how nimble it was to our clumsy human pod

I remember being sure that this guy was playing with us, and the intelligence in its eyes was undeniable. It is experiences like these that convince me that the majority of humankind has got it completely wrong in how they assess other animal species. Dolphins are perfectly adapted to their environment, highly social and exhibit both behaviours of teaching/learning and play.

We would do well to apply a different methodology in studying creatures like these by assuming they are as intelligent as we are, and then working backwards to find the truth of the matter rather than inventing experiments that assume they are of a lesser intelligence.

I have personally become convinced through interactions like these that it is not a matter of levels of intelligence, but rather types and applications of intelligence.
Please do check out the video reading, and let me know what you think in the comments.
Unfortunately, I didn’t own any dive camera during that trip, and the scuba divers who did weren’t open to giving up the footage they caught so I’ve had to use stock footage from pexels.com to illustrate the poetry film.

What do you think… does the poem and film adequately express the experience I had when scuba diving with a pod of wild dolphins?

Let me know in the comments 🙂

The poetry in this video is:

Attributions - All sources are creative commons.

Music: the music used in this track is in the public domain, free to use under copyright law. Link: Source

The digital art used as thumbnail in this post was made by me using a combination of deep dream generator & to GIMP to add titles. If you have enjoyed this poem you can check out my other work on my homepage @raj808.

Video Sources from Pexels.com:

https://www.pexels.com/video/a-pod-of-dolphins-hunting-sardines-5607991/
https://www.pexels.com/video/a-pod-of-dolphins-hunting-a-school-of-sardines-5607992/
https://www.pexels.com/video/group-of-dolphins-swimming-underwater-5277928/
https://www.pexels.com/video/video-of-a-under-the-sea-with-dolphins-4592360/

Thanks for watching 🌿

_{Click banner to visit the community page}

_{Find us on twitter by clicking the banner above.}

▶️ 3Speak