This video of a large dolphin wiping out a surfer looks painful. But surfer Sam Yoon seems to have loved every moment of his close encounter off Australia’s Gold Coast with the leaping aquatic mammal this week.
The dolphin appeared to torque midair in a last-ditch bid to miss Yoon, who was sitting on his board in the waters off Duranbah Beach. But it landed right on top of him.
“I knew that he realized he’s got to do something, too,” Yoon told the broadcaster 9NEWS Thursday. “I looked up and thought, ‘F*** this, there’s no way I can get away from this.’”
The dolphin struck him on the head, shoulder and back, but Yoon wasn’t seriously hurt, except for some “stinging.”
And he was super-charged on adrenaline after watching the strange encounter that a witness had recorded with his cell phone.
Yoon told 9NEWS he continued to stay in the water to surf after the body-slam, accompanied by several dolphins.
“They communicated to each other that every time I’m paddling, they’re coming, they’re supposed to jump, they were getting away from me,” he said.
He later described his encounter with the animals as “so chilled.”
“I was singing to them for like the whole surf … beautiful,” he told the Brisbane Times.
“I’ve never seen that happen to anybody before,” he said of the collision.
But dolphin collisions can happen.
In September, Jed Gradison, 13, was surfing off the West Australian coast when a dolphin leaped from a wave and landed on him.
“The dolphin reacted, I think, really shocked — almost as shocked as I was,” he told PerthNow.
The teen’s back was sore, but otherwise he wasn’t hurt. The dolphin, however, did hit his nose through Gradison’s board, but seemed uninjured. “That must have hurt a bit,” he added.
