Bottlenose dolphin surprises boat racers in the San Francisco Bay

Courtesy Julia Smith Courtesy Julia Smith Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Bottlenose dolphin surprises boat racers in the San Francisco Bay 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Julia Smith, Marianne Armand, and Debbie Fehr — three boat racers who have teamed together in the Santana 22 fleet for a few years now — were on a run out on the Bay over the weekend when they spotted something out of the ordinary.

An energetic bottlenose dolphin suddenly sprung out of the water near the front of their boat, "dancing" alongside them as they speeded along.

"We were so excited and shocked! None of us had ever seen a dolphin in the Bay," Smith wrote in an email to SFGATE. "We see Bay porpoises a lot, but have never seen this kind of dolphin or behavior in SF Bay."

Noting that the dolphin was "actively" jumping next to them for almost ten minutes, Smith said other racing boats also caught a view of the playful mammal.

"It was an amazing experience that was pretty exciting to share with our fleet," she says, adding that it was "so exciting that we wanted to share it with the public too!"

(Warning: mild NSFW language)

As Director of San Francisco's Golden Gate Cetacean Research Bill Keener says, this behavior is not odd for bottlenose dolphins who live along the California coast, although it is less commonly seen in the Bay Area.

"We don't see it a lot here, but it happens," Keener tells SFGATE. "They're big-brained animals, very intelligent. They're curious, and they see people in boats all the time."

Keener adds that there are around 600 estimated bottlenose dolphins inhabiting the "narrow band of ocean" just off the coastline stretching from San Diego to San Francisco, but that these mammals didn't really enter the Bay Area region until 1983, when El Niño drew them north.

Anyone who witnesses and photographs dolphins are encouraged to report sightings to Golden Gate Cetacean Research via the organization's online form.

Alyssa Pereira is a staff writer for SFGATE. Follow her here on Twitter.