You may have even heard the stories Doyle tells of his days on the water—saving stranded animals, escorting VIPs across our waters and helping build new memories with each trip. But all the years as an institution, and all the stories Doyle’s tenure have helped him amass spin off one driving passion: the dolphins.
“They’re just so beautiful,” he said. “When you have a dolphin look you in the eye for the first time, there’s a real connection. You can’t help but feel in awe.”
Heading up the creek
Just about a year ago, Commander Zodiac departed South Beach Marina for the last time, drawing to a close 34 years as one of the area’s biggest attractions. Now, nestled among the live oaks and sparkling water views of Broad Creek Marina, Commander Zodiac and its captain are starting a new chapter.
“There’s a lot of activity down here,” Doyle said, his eyes trailing off to where a group was making their way into Up the Creek Pub for a quick bite after a session at Zipline Hilton Head. Nearby, a forklift gently pulled a boat down from the towering racks of Broad Creek’s boathouse while families milled about waiting for their chance to escape the shore on a zodiac. “This has been a great move.”
While the location has changed, the experience has not. “We like to keep it small,” Doyle said. “A small boat can get into small creeks, so it keeps the experience very intimate. That’s always been our core business model—small, personalized trips. That’s worked out well for us.”
The core of the Commander Zodiac notion came when then 24-year-old Doyle landed on Hilton Head Island after extended stays in Aspen, Colorado and Maui, Hawaii. “A little lightbulb went off when I was in Hawaii on a glass bottom boat tour … Hilton Head has a lot of dolphins,” Doyle said. “My business partner Jana Moore and I came back that following year and opened Zodiac in 1986. We were doing dolphin and nature tours, and we were pretty much one of the first to do it on the island.”
Moore, who serves as operations manager, has been Doyle’s secret weapon since the beginning, and has helped build Commander Zodiac into an institution. “I knew we’d made it when we would have three generations on a boat,” Doyle said. “I would have a family I took on a tour when their kid was 12, and now the kid was bringing her kids.”
More than a tour
For Doyle, his years at the helm of Commander Zodiac haven’t just been about giving families memories that will last a lifetime. It’s also been about giving back. Since the early 1990s, he’s been one of the handful of people on the island given the state’s blessing to help stranded animals.
“Every now and again I’ll get a call. They strand everywhere, even on Daufuskie,” he said. “DNR likes to look for any cause of death—entanglement, crab traps, fishing gear. If it’s not too deceased, they will take it to Charleston and do necropsy to try and find cause of death.”
Not all of his stories have a happy ending, but one that does sounds almost too much like a Disney movie to be true. “I was on a tour, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that looked like the Loch Ness monster. It ended up being a juvenile humpback whale,” Doyle said. A rarity in our waters, humpback whales tend to stay about 50-60 miles offshore as they migrate past Hilton Head Island. This juvenile, Doyle reckons, had become separated from its pod and wound up here in its confusion.
Unfortunately, as the young whale was leaving the sound, it became stuck on a tidal sandbar at the south channel. With its skeleton under threat of collapsing under its own weight and its skin at risk of burning in the sun, Doyle knew he needed to act fast. He and his crew brought out buckets and towels to keep the whale wet while they waited for the tide to shift him loose.
“I just looked into his eye, it was the size of a grapefruit, and I told him, ‘Nice whale; we’re here to help,’” he said. With his team fighting off the sun, the waiting game ended with the tide coming in to free the trapped whale. As if on cue, a pod of dolphins approached to escort the young whale to sea.
“Three weeks later, I got a call from a whale network in the northeast saying, ‘We have your whale here,’” Doyle said. The young whale had found its herd and was safe with its family. “That was pretty neat.”
Welcome aboard
Having spent decades as one of the most visible captains on Hilton Head Island has led to no shortage of notoriety for Doyle. “In the mid-’90s, National Geographic wanted to do a documentary on strand feeding, which is really prevalent here,” Doyle said. “They contacted Tom Murphy and asked who the local guy was, and he gave them my name. That first one we did was with Nat Geo, and it ended up being one of their worldwide shows.”
The subsequent popularity of that doc put Doyle on the radar for nature shows and networks of all kinds, with the Discovery Channel and the BBC lining up to take their cameras out with Commander Zodiac. He even took a couple out for an episode of House Hunters. (“I wasn’t on camera very much, but I’m in it,” he said). One filming trip saw Doyle sharing a boat with the legendary Sir Richard Attenborough. “I got to spend two weeks with him out on the boat, which was fantastic,” he said. “We had him over for dinner, and his stories were just amazing.”
The knighted naturalist wasn’t the only A-lister to have had the Commander Zodiac experience. “A few years ago, I got a call … that First Lady Rosalynn Carter and her daughter wanted to book a dolphin tour,” he said. “It was the two of them and their whole entourage. The sheriff’s office brought a boat with one Secret Service guy, and I had a Secret Service officer on the boat with me, Mrs. Carter and Amy. Of all the days for the water to be rough, it was that day.”
Despite a little chop on the waves, the former First Lady and First Daughter enjoyed their time with Commander Zodiac. “She was a wonderful lady,” Doyle said. “The Secret Service agent told me, ‘I wish we could do this every day.’”
Hearing Tom Doyle tell these stories and knowing that he actually does get to do this every day, you can tell that after decades behind the mast, he still loves what he does.
“For me, I love when kids get out on the water, they see a dolphin for the first time in their life and they’re freaking out,” he said. “It reminds you of the first time, how you felt when you saw a dolphin for the first time. The reaction is priceless.”
As are the memories made by everyone who gets out on the water with Commander Zodiac.
