Retired wedding photographer Roger Foster is no stranger to the sand and surf of Moana in Adelaide's south, but a recent trip to the beach yielded an unexpected up-close encounter with a baby dolphin.
Mr Foster was with his grandson on Friday afternoon at his home overlooking the coast when he noticed a "bit of a kerfuffle on the beach".
He said that, after getting his camera and going down to the shore for a closer look, he saw that the onlookers had gathered near a dolphin that had beached itself in shallow water.
"It was only about a metre long. It was only a baby," Mr Foster said.
"He or she was probably part of a pod that go up and down all the time."
As onlookers tried to contact fauna rescuers, others at the scene tried to help the creature back to sea — initially, to no avail.
"They were trying to push it out and, as soon as it got a bit of a wiggle out with its tail, it started to go out and … then the waves just broke and brought it back in again," he said.
"I said to [one] guy, 'Mate, you need to push him right out through the breakers', because Moana's not known for it's big swells but there was a reasonable-sized swell running that day."
Mr Foster said it was then that one of two men who had been trying to help the dolphin back to sea waded out with it — and it finally managed to beat the current.
"There were two guys together and one sort of passed it to the other," Mr Foster said.
"The guy pushed him out through the breakers and that last photograph is him swimming horizontally to the beach.
"Nobody's seen him since then, so with a bit of luck he got back to his mum."
While dolphins aren't an uncommon sight along Moana, Mr Foster said he had never known one to beach itself before.
"Every morning there's a pod of dolphins that goes from south to north and then in the afternoon they come back," he said.
"Maybe he was just a little bit too young to get back on his own and just needed a little bit of help.
"Mother nature's a funny thing."
