Understanding #Dolphins

UNDERSTANDING DOLPHINS

The life experience one gains from years of being around and engaging the magnificent Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin lasts a lifetime. The main character in my book, Five Miles Deep, is Marina Victoria, the queen of a people that arrived on earth before the dawn of man. Marina uses the intelligence of the Bottlenosed Dolphins in her quest to rescue her people.

In studies made by the U.S. Navy, dolphins were trained to find and recognize underwater mines and explosive devices so naval divers could disarm enemy explosives and save lives of sailors and their ships from certain destruction. Dolphins have, with or without training, saved many lives of sailors, and swimmers from deadly shark attacks.

In the past, my partners in the attractions that we owned in Cape Coral, Florida and in Townsend, Tennessee had dolphin and sea lion shows, in conjunction with our water ski shows and the Waltzing Waters shows. I was invited along to help capture and train dolphins that we used in the shows. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 mandated the method and means of treating the animals we captured, and they were safe and unharmed at all times. That was not always the case with the humans involved with the capture, however.

One such case was a fully uniformed Florida Marine Patrol officer who was assigned to accompany us on a dolphin catch in the waters of Pine Island Sound of the Coast of Useppa Island in Lee County, Florida. The officer stayed out of the way when we brought a young male dolphin along side the boat, secured him on the lifting sling to bring him on board. We had the animal out of the water when the officer decided he wanted to help. He wrapped his arms around the dolphin about a foot ahead of his tail flukes.

Jack Scarpuzzi, our dolphin trainer hollered at the officer, “Don’t grab him there...” when the dolphin flipped the two-hundred pound officer about 10 yards into the water and the weight of his gear and guns began pulling him down. We had to drop the dolphin and set him free in order to rescue the drowning officer.

Later in the day, we captured two more dolphins and brought them back for training in the shows. Dolphins love being fed fresh fish and reward us with the way they play. We don’t really train them to jump, flip or retrieve items. They do that naturally. We just teach them to read clocks so they know when it is show time. They perform for the attention and affection we share. Mealtime is for eating, not as a reward for performing. Thanks to the trainers at Sea World, marine mammal behavior and biology has provided us with a wealth of knowledge about the Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins

are an awesome animal to share the planet with. Their intelligence has been measured at the level of a middle-schooler.

#ExpressYourself: My Favorite Book #author #IamReading #paranormal

Welcome back to my blog. I have decided to join the weekly Express Yourself Blog Hop. Each Tuesday I will be answering a question that is posted on the Express Yourself Banner for that given month. This week I was asked to chose one of my favorite books. Turn to page 89 and write the 8th and 9th sentences found on that page. 

I have two books published and two more ready for release. The book I chose to write about that I feel emotionally close to is Dying Dreams, the fictional account of Evan Shea and how, as a successful father, former athlete and businessman who must now deal with the fact he has only two months to live.

Death from a malignant brain tumor is not instant and is not pain free. Often, the treatment plan exceeds the pain levels of the disease itself. My granddaughter endured this inhuman experience from the age of thirteen until her death at age fifteen. She was able to survive all of the invasive medical procedures with dignity and strength, knowing she was terminal. She believed the experimental procedures might help some other young cancer victim beat the disease. She allowed the painful experiments and treatment options to erode her young body right up to the end when she asked her mother for her permission to pass away.

That is why I dedicated the book to my daughter, Lisa and her young daughter, Shawna. They provided the story line for Dying Dreams and the work of fiction it became. A year after Shawna died, Lisa and I went to lunch. She was depressed and had no appetite. Trying to cheer her up, I made a funny comment about being pregnant. She said that her husband, then almost 45 years old, wasn’t able to father children anymore.

A year after Shawna died, Little Hope was born.

DYING DREAMS

Page 89

Lines 8 and 9

Just then the fish jumped.

“It’s the edible kind. Not Flipper!”

Previews and Memories: An #Author's Inspiration #IAmWriting #Fantasy

PREVIEWS AND MEMORIES

I never realized what a long ride it was from Recife, Brazil to Atlanta, Georgia until this week. It is a three-hour flight from Recife to Sao Paulo, about 1600 miles. The ride to Orlando was over eight hours covering the 2600-mile length of Brazil, and flying over Georgetown, Guyana and Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela. This is the principal location of my next book, A Diamond In The Rough.

This is the story of Gil Devos, a man who spent forty years buying rough diamonds from the miners who labored to extract the hardest, most precious stones out of an unyielding earth. Actually, diamonds do not become dangerous until they find themselves in the hands of men who will risk everything to own them, steal them or even kill for them.

Gil lived the story I tell in the book. Mountain Springs House will release A Diamond In The Rough on June 27, which just happens to be my 77^th birthday. Well, it just so happens, Gil Devos will be meeting me in Odessa, Florida where we will once again visit our mutual friend, Jack Wylie and do a little water skiing and a lot of storytelling. Who knows, Gil just may come up with another story about chasing diamonds again. He has never lost “the love for the rough,” as he calls it.

As I continued sitting on the increasingly hardening seats of TAM Brazilian Flight 8110, it carried me 40,000 feet over the Atlantic where, an hour later we passed over Ponce, Puerto Rico and I was barely able to see the old Air Force Base at Roosevelt Roads on the east coast of the island. This is the location of the action that takes place in my first book, “Five Miles Deep,” the story of Marina Victoria, Queen of an ancient civilization living five miles deep in the Puerto Rican Trench. This is the second deepest location on the planet.

I was able to see the darkened water where the 35,535-foot depth of the trench exists.

My imagination kicked in as I visualized the team of scientists and Navy Seals descending in the NASA built submersible, into the trench depths in an attempt to rescue the citizens who have lived under a protective dome in a pristine, ideal world since before the ice age. Yes, Five Miles Deep is a science fiction story. But, it is so close to reality that the reader can imagine the events really happening.

And, as the Airbus A 330 continued tracking north, I was already missing my daily walks on miles of sandy beaches in Brazil as they disappeared further behind me. I even had a few memories of the events that occur in the sequel to Five Miles Deep, “The Return of Marina Victoria,” in the Tiger Shark Terror. This is book two in the series that takes place in Recife, Brazil, in the State of Pernambuco in a place called Suape. Mountain Springs House in the fourth quarter of this year will release this book. 

Reality kicked in several hours later when the Air Tran Boeing 200 touched down in Atlanta and I put on my jacket for the first time in six months and stepped outside in the cold 70-degree weather of north Georgia.