Dolphin Leaps on Boat, Couple Injured

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Norman and Barbara Howard were out for a quiet cruise with their daughter in a 18-foot center console boat when an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin jumped in with them. The incident took place north of the North Causeway bridge in New Smyrna Beach.

"We were going under the bridge, and the next thing I knew I had a big old fish on top of us," Howard, 64, said.

Howard and his wife were treated and released Thursday afternoon. The couple suffered cuts, bumps and bruises.

The dolphin was approximately 8- to 10-foot-long and 400 pounds.

Howard tried to push the dolphin away but it knocked them to the boat's deck.

"I was just trying to get it off my wife," he said.

"That thing had a good punch," Howard said. "Mike Tyson does not hit that hard."

Henderson, who is the boyfriend of the Howards' daughter Laura Hall was able to help Howard get the mammal out of the boat.

"This was their first time in the boat," Hall said of her parents. Barbara Howard had even joked that the marine adventure might put them on one of those funniest home video shows.

"I was pointing out to Buck (Norman Howard) where we had caught a mess of snook," Henderson said.

They were going past the Diamond Head condominiums when, Henderson saw some dolphins ahead. Then just before the bridge "the dolphin came out of the water about three or four feet in front of the boat."

"It jumped about head high, arching across the bow," he said. Henderson said he tried to reverse the boat, but its momentum and the mammal's trajectory intersected.

"It looked like he was chasing bait," the 47-year-old Edgewater resident said.

John Rice, a vacationing Cape Cod commercial fisherman, said he didn't see the impact, but certainly heard it.

"I thought they had hit another boat or maybe a manatee," he said of the Henderson's craft. But when he peered through the bridge pilings, he saw the occupants struggling to roll the creature back into the water.

"I have heard of sharks jumping in boats, but this is the first time I have heard of this," he said from the fishing pier directly adjacent to the bridge.

"My guess would be that it was a calf that was either not paying attention or maybe trying to escape something and got spooked," Janet Mann, a professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., said. "They don't jump that high unless they're trying to get away from something."

The dolphin encounter was Howard's third mishap in three days -- first was a brake line failure, followed by a near accident when a car ahead of him got tangled up with a power line on Wednesday.

"I am going to stay home tomorrow," he said.