Imagine you go for your Saturday morning walk and there, in a lagoon by your house you find a trapped dolphin. The 8-foot long animal is struggling to stay alive in only a few feet of water and the tide’s falling fast. Who do you even call?

This is a real scenario that residents of South Carolina’s “Hampton Lake” private community faced. At 10:30 AM they realized a dolphin had swam in to the tidal lagoon on the property and gotten herself trapped. Luckily, someone thought to call Amber Kuehn. Kuehn is the local sea turtle expert, but that’s not all. She’s the local volunteer logistics coordinator for the Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network. She even has a trailer set up with a tarp and sling to transport aquatic mammals such as the dolphin.

Kuehn arrived and IDed the dolphin as a mother who swims the nearby May River. Kuehn guessed that heavy rainfall had raised the river’s level enough that the dolphin swam through the culvert into the lagoon and became trapped. Her name is Lucky. But on this Saturday, the community would come together to prove just how fitting Lucky’s name really is.

How to roadtrip a dolphin back to the sea

As I mentioned, Kuehn already had a trailer set up to carry a large marine mammal in a sort of sling. But she had a major problem: Lucky was trapped in a lagoon far from the nearest road. Kuehn expected a large enough team of volunteers could use a special tarp to carry Lucky overland. But with the eight-foot dolphin weighing 400-500 pounds, Kuehn would need some extra muscle. Two more LMMN employees began driving down from Charleston, but Kuehn knew Lucky couldn’t survive long in the drying lagoon.

So she called the Bluffton Township Fire Department.

“This young kid answers the phone and I was like, ‘Hey, my name is Amber Kuehn. I have a dolphin at Hampton Lakes that I need help removing from one of their water catchment ditches.’”

The poor dispatcher didn’t have any procedure on the books for a dolphin rescue. Kuehn concluded, “He said, ‘Ma’am, I’m gonna have to call my supervisor.’”

A spokesman for the fire department confirmed it had never before attempted a dolphin rescue. But the crew was game to help Lucky out. Volunteers from the local community even hopped in to fill out the ragtag team.

They were able to roll Lucky onto a tarp specially designed to transport aquatic mammals. Then they attached it to two long poles to form a sort of litter. The team hauled Lucky out of the lagoon, and overland through the woods to May River Road (S.C. 46). Then Lucky went for a roadtrip.

The firefighters and volunteers loaded Lucky’s litter onto Kuehn’s trailer. Then they all drove down May River Road to the nearest dock. At 6 PM, they hoisted the litter again and walked Lucky down to the tidal river to set her free. “It was just such a local effort,” Kuehn said. You can see footage of Lucky’s rescue in the video embedded below: