\n Volunteer crew members from Littlehampton RNLI were joined by a playful pod of dolphins during a routine exercise.\n<\/p>\n
\n The encounter took place on July 9, when helm Andy Harris and crew members Sophie Collins, Ian Kirkham and Mark Jordan were out on the Renee Sherman lifeboat.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sophie Collins, who joined the crew in August 2024, said: “It was literally the best day of my life.\n<\/p>\n
\n “It was such a peaceful sight and the perfect way to end our evening training session.”\n<\/p>\n
\n The dolphins, including a mother and calf, stayed with the boat for around 10 minutes, leaping out of the water and playing in the lifeboat’s wake.\n<\/p>\n
\n Mr Harris said: “It’s one of those sights you never get tired of seeing. We saw them ahead, then we saw another group coming up behind us.\n<\/p>\n
\n “They came to have a look at us and were jumping clear out of the water. They followed us for some of the way home, too.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Mr Kirkham said: “It was superb to watch how they effortlessly rode our bow wave and the boat’s wake. I had to remember to keep a lookout as well as watch the dolphins.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Littlehampton RNLI is operated entirely by volunteers and covers the West Sussex coast between Worthing and Bognor Regis.\n<\/p>\n
\n The crew trains every Thursday evening and Sunday morning and in 2025, they were called into action 77 times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Volunteer crew members from Littlehampton RNLI were joined by a playful pod of dolphins during a routine exercise.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-693758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}