Can you say you’ve surfed with dolphins if the dolphins didn’t feel like surfing?

Dolphins, it is often said, are the world’s best surfers, and the internet is full of videos to prove it. In cyberspace, you can find footage of them cruising along peeling pointbreak waves off the coast of California; you can watch them getting air multiple times on the same wave in Western Australia, and you can even watch one apparently aggro dolphin wiping out a stand-up paddleboarder who dared to get in its way, with what we might charitably call a shoulder charge, if dolphins could be said to have shoulders.

With so much surfing-withdolphins footage out there, you’d think that most long-time surfers would have a dolphin encounter story to tell, but somehow – in spite of more than three decades spent bobbing about in the water in various seas and oceans all around the world – it took me until last weekend to get mine.

To be fair, I’ve had a few near misses over the years. Once, down in Cornwall, a pod showed up at a spot I’d been surfing just a few minutes after I’d got out of the water. I had a great view of them from half-way up the cliff path, but I still wished I’d stayed out a little longer so I could have seen them up close.

More recently, a friend was practically mobbed by dolphins off the east coast of Scotland while I was still on the beach, frantically pulling on my wetsuit. Inevitably, by the time I’d paddled out they were long gone, so I had to make do with my friend, wide-eyed and buzzing, telling me how incredible it was to see them swooping right under his board.

Last weekend, though, at long last, I finally had my flipper moment.

In surfing terms, it wasn’t exactly a classic day, but it wasn’t a bad one either: the waves were a little smaller than forecast, but the bigger ones were still worth having, if you had the patience to wait for them, and there was barely any wind – a rare event in our blowy little North Atlantic archipelago – making the wave faces smooth like glass. It was a lazy day, a day for letting your mind wander between the sets, a day for watching the gannets dive-bombing in the distance.

It was during one of these restful, brain-off periods that I first noticed something breaking the surface of the water that was definitely not a gannet – a splash caused by something leaving the water rather than by something entering it. A few seconds later and there it was again, perhaps eight or ten metres directly out to sea, a flash of something dark moving from left to right: a fin.

I’d love to be able to say that I instantly recognised it as a dolphin fin, and was moved to tears by the beauty of the moment. In truth, though, I hadn’t had time to register what kind of fin it was, only that I was now in close proximity to a large, finned creature, and so there followed a few slightly tense, jury’s-out moments, as I waited to see what kind of finned creature it was. (Yes, I know shark attacks are vanishingly rare off the coast of the UK, but still: I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me in those moments that whispered “sharkinthewater”.)

Anyway, happily, the next time the creature broke the surface it did so in an unmistakably dolphin-y way, back arched perfectly, long, curved, reassuringly dolphin-esque fin clearly on display. Short of holding up a handwritten sign saying “chill dude, I’m just a dolphin” it couldn’t have done much more to signal what it was, so I relaxed and kept watching.

Pretty soon, the rest of the pod appeared, breaking the surface a little further out to sea. How many? Four, maybe five – they were only surfacing intermittently so it was difficult to tell. The one I had seen first, though, was the only one who ventured close to shore, as if he’d been dispatched to do a quick surf check on behalf of the others.

I had become so caught up in looking at the dolphins that I’d almost forgotten about the waves, but now, after a bit of a lull, a set was approaching and I had to make a decision: catch a wave or keep on enjoying the dolphin show.

Somebody more in tune with the natural world would no doubt have ignored the waves and focused on the dolphins. Me? Well, please don’t judge me reader, but it’d been a couple of weeks since I’d managed to fit in a surf and the first wave of the set was beginning to taper enticingly around the edge of the sandbar – so yes, I turned my back on the dolphins and paddled hard for the shore, hopped to my feet and enjoyed the ride.

By the time I’d paddled back out, the pod had evidently made the collective decision that the waves I was surfing weren’t really worth their while, because they were now further out to sea and heading south, in the direction of several superior surf spots. Soon they had rounded the headland and disappeared from view. More than likely, they found better waves further down the coast, and no doubt they would have found better surfers.

Still, I suppose because I caught that one wave as they were passing through I can now technically say I’ve surfed with dolphins – even if the dolphins in question clearly had no interest in surfing with me.

A small part of me in those moments whispered “sharkinthewater”