Kerry Ware and her family were on a boat near Fort George Island, Fla., when they saw a beached dolphin stranded on a sandbar, ABC News reports.
"It was just flapping and it looked really helpless so we stopped the boat to see what was going on," Ware told Local 10 News.
Grabbing the dolphin by the tail, Ware and her father George Heheman pulled the animal -- which they said weighed about 300 pounds -- to deeper waters, saving her in the nick of time.
"It was only about four inches of water left on the sandbar," Heheman told Local 10 News. "When we got over there I knew we had to get that dolphin off the sandbar or we'd have never moved her."
The rescue video, which was captured on camera by her 11-year-old son Justin, was posted on Ware's YouTube channel. In the caption, Ware said that the dolphin and her calf had been trying to get out of a tidal creek when the mother got stranded.
Once the mother dolphin had been pulled to safety, Ware wrote that they herded the young calf -- who had been waiting nearby -- to deeper water and the two dolphins swam away together.
"[It] made our day," she wrote, adding that reuniting the dolphin and her calf had been a "super experience".
Last month, The Huffington Post reported that 30 dolphins were rescued by beachgoers in Brazil when the stranded animals were helped back into deeper waters.
Watch that rescue video here: