But Thursday was the first time he's ever herded dolphins.

Blair Perkins, a captain with a whale-watch company in Nantucket and a commercial bay scallop fisherman, has volunteered with several marine projects, such as helping animals entangled in fishing nets.

Perkins, 57, lives with his wife and three children in Nantucket. When he heard from his brother that two dolphins — a mother and her calf — were stranded in Nantucket Harbor near the Great Harbor Yacht Club on Wednesday, he offered to help.

A scallop fisherman during the winter, he took his small boat — the Oldsquaw (the former name of a common seabird) — with three officials from the International Fund for Animal Welfare out to sea.


After reaching the animals, the team herded the mother and her calf out to the Nantucket Sound. The rescue took 2½ hours.

"We had to go back in a zigzag pattern to herd them," he said. "It turns out the dolphins were very accommodating. There were a couple of times I had to call the ferry boats, to inform them of what we were doing."

It was "flat calm out there," said Sergeant Keith Robinson of the Massachusetts Environmental Police, who played a role in the effort.

Robinson had been up since early Thursday with animal control officer Suzie Gail and Scott Leonard of the Nantucket Marine Conservation Program, scouring the waters off Nantucket with binoculars looking for the dolphins, which had been spotted stuck on a sandbar Wednesday.

When they saw the animals around 7:30 a.m., they notified the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Robinson said.

The ferry that the team was supposed to take out to Nantucket developed mechanical problems, so a charter air flight was used instead. There, they got into three vehicles and eventually met Perkins at the harbor, before heading out to the dolphins.


"It was wonderful to see when we did get them out [of the harbor], that they completely changed their behavior," Perkins said. He said they began breaching, or leaping out of the water, and spyhopping, which is lifting their heads up.

"In such an enclosed harbor, it's very stressful," Perkins said. Plus, in cold waters, they are "in for a shock."

"Sometimes a pod will come in chasing a food source or something like that, that may have drawn them in," Robinson said.

He said the dolphins may have got into trouble because they had not been in that area before.

"They can get disorientated . . . it's like entering a maze," he said. "Any vibration or noise, such as from the Steamship Authority [ferry], might have thrown them for a loop."

Globe correspondent J.D. Capelouto contributed to this report. Alexandra Koktsidis can be reached at alexandra.

koktsidis@globe.com.