Captain Eddie Maron has fished the waters off Hatteras for thirty-one years. He has run charters and he has run commercial. He has been caught out in weather he should not have been caught out in, and he has, by his own count, made it back every time.

The night of May 3 he very nearly did not.

Maron had gone out at four that morning aboard the Sallie M., a forty-two-foot Carolina hull he has owned since 2011. He was working a tilefish line about thirty-eight miles east-southeast of Oregon Inlet. The forecast had called for a small craft advisory by late afternoon. The forecast was wrong by about six hours and roughly fifteen knots of wind.

By two in the afternoon, the seas had built to ten feet. By three, they were thirteen. The starboard engine on the Sallie M. began running rough at three-thirty and quit entirely at four. Maron radioed in his position and started for home on the port engine, which was running, he said, on what he could only describe as luck.

The dolphins arrived shortly after that.

He first noticed three of them off his port quarter, riding the face of a swell. Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are common off the Outer Banks, and Maron has seen them most days he has been on the water. What was unusual was the number. Within twenty minutes, there were, by his estimate, between twenty-five and thirty animals around the boat.

Maron, who has a small video camera mounted on his wheelhouse, recorded much of it.

They did not leave.

For the next four hours, as the Sallie M. made its way back toward the inlet at six knots, the dolphins stayed within fifty yards of the stern. They surfaced in groups of four and five. They crossed the wake. They moved up alongside the hull and fell back.

Maron, who has a small video camera mounted on his wheelhouse, recorded much of it.

"I am not a sentimental man," he said, on the dock the morning after. "I will not tell you they saved my life. I will tell you they were there and they did not leave and I was glad of it."

Whether the dolphins were responding to the boat, to the weather, or to something else entirely is a question that several marine biologists have, in the days since, declined to answer with confidence.

Dr. Ann Pabst, who runs the marine mammal stranding program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, watched the footage on Maron's phone.

"There is no question that the animals were associating with the boat," Pabst said. "The behavior is consistent with what we sometimes see when dolphins shelter near a large object in heavy weather. Boats provide a hydrodynamic disturbance. The wake can be useful to them. It is also possible they were simply traveling on the same heading. We cannot, from a video, distinguish those possibilities."

Pabst was careful to note that she does not assign intent to wild animals lightly. She has spent her career pushing back against the temptation to read human motives into cetacean behavior.

"That said," she added, "the duration is striking. Four hours is a long time to stay with a single vessel. Whatever the reason, the association was real."

Maron made the inlet at eight-fifteen that evening. The seas inside the bar were running six feet. He took two of them over the bow. The port engine held. He tied up at the commercial dock at nine.

The dolphins, he said, peeled off about a mile from the inlet. He watched them turn south in a long, loose line and disappear into the chop.

The Sallie M. is in the yard now, having both engines pulled. The starboard one had a cracked manifold. The port one, the mechanic told Maron, had perhaps another twenty minutes in it.

Maron has been a commercial fisherman long enough not to believe in signs. He is, however, planning to make a donation to the stranding program at UNCW when the engine bill is paid. He has not decided how much.

"They were good company," he said. "That is what I can say. They were good company on a bad day."