When an injured dolphin washed up on Bondi Beach on Saturday, the lifeguards of hit reality TV show Bondi Rescue did what they are trained to do - worked as hard as they could to save a life.
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"Not all rescues are in our operations procedure," one of the show's stars, Anthony 'Harries' Carroll posted on social media. "We tried so hard to save this poor dolphin. We put him back in the ocean so many times. He swam off, but kept coming back."
The dolphin washed up on the beach late on Saturday afternoon. A video posted by the chief lifeguard, Bruce 'Hoppo' Hopkins, shows six men, including lifeguards and a surfer, working to return the dolphin to the water. There are scrapes visible on its belly.
Hopkins told Fairfax Media that dolphins can be seen off Bondi most days. Although the lifeguards have assisted sick and injured seals on Bondi Beach before, this was the first time the team had seen a dolphin beach itself.
"We have a lot of dolphins come into the bay at Bondi," he said.
"It's always great watching them going around the surfers and catching the waves. We thought this one was just catching waves and coming in, until it got right up on the sand bank in the shallows and charged up the beach and beached itself.
"We went down and with members of the public tried to help it back into the water. It got back in and swam off .. then it just kept coming back. It did that three or four times."
A video posted by Hoppo (@lifeguardhoppo) on Jun 25, 2016 at 12:27am PDT
Hopkins said they tried to keep the dolphin immersed in the water and as calm as possible. "Then it just stopped moving and passed away. It was upsetting for the lifeguards, nobody likes to see ... such a beautiful animal pass away."
He said the lifeguards carried the three metre-long dolphin off the beach on a stretcher, before staff from Taronga Zoo took it away for tests to determine how it died.
"Hopefully it was just natural causes," Hopkins said.
On his Instagram account, Hopkins posted: "We tried so hard to save this dolphin but were unsuccessful", while Bondi Lifeguards wrote: "Sad arvo at Bondi"