This town is groaning under the weight of dolphin merchandise. Dolphin merchandise is very popular here, just not with me. I've toyed with the idea of setting up a museum of truly dreadful dolphin merchandise along the lines of the Mangaweka Shell Museum or the Bluff Paua Shell House but a) I suspect the only people who'd visit and appreciate it would be my family and friends, b) the exhibits would be far too easy to collect and I need a bigger challenge and c) I'm starting to really enjoy myself here and don't want to get drummed out of town.
I have however finally found a piece of dolphin merchandise I like, but it wasn't in Mandurah. A while back I found the card above in a shop in Perth. That shop has just gone into receivership. That figures.
Life is full of mysteries. One such mystery is why dolphins - more than any other animal on the planet - have inspired so much truly dreadful merchandise. Sometimes when I am bored I play a game called "Find a cool dolphin thing". There are no winners in this game. I have yet to find a single piece of dolphin merchandise that I think is cool, but I love to be proven wrong, so if you ever find one, then please do send me a photo. If I was a tutor at a design school I would amuse myself by setting my students an assignment to design a cool dolphin thing, because I suspect that it simply isn't possible.
The reason this mystifies me so much is that I appreciate as much as other less bitter and twisted people, just how cool it is to actually see dolphins in the wild. That day when we went to the Dawesville Channel to see where the whales had been we didn't actually see any whales, but it didn't matter.
Because we did have a beautiful walk on a beautiful evening,
and we saw more dolphins in half an hour than I had seen in my entire life to that point.
And it was seriously cool. I go so excited that I took hundreds of uncool photos of rippling water where dolphins had recently been,
before I actually managed to catch one measly image of one.
The dolphins came right into the canals off the channel. The canals are deep and have very steep sides and the dolphins were leaping out of the water right next to us. We dubbed them a "plod" of dolphins as they were just meandering around so slowly and lingered for so long.
One of the dolphins we saw had some major damage to its dorsal fin. After being told of a possible cause of this from a holidaying marine biologist, I have a new thing to add to my "Not To Do" list: Run over a dolphin with a jet ski. Because that would be uncooler than the even uncoolest dolphin ornament yet created.
