'Dolphin Tale': Dan Strzempka of Sarasota designed Winter the dolphin's prosthesis News.

But it took an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named Winter to put the 41-year-old Sarasota limb artificer on the map in Hollywood. The big-screen reading of Strzempka's most different and now pre-eminent patient opens nationwide Friday when Winter stars in her own biopic, a 2D/3D layer called "Dolphin Tale." In making the movie, steersman Charles Martin Smith rolled Strzempka and a co-worker into one composite respectability played by Morgan Freeman. "Every film I spy about amputees mostly turns out corny," says Strzempka, who attended the "Dolphin Tale" premiere decisive week in Hollywood. "I thought, well, this one could be corny, too, or it could be great. Fortunately, it turned out great.

" Strzempka runs the Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics lab off Bee Ridge Road and makes a living making particularly fittings - mostly for people, from children with cancer to hobbled fighting veterans. "We have these kinds of stories every day. People please me patients from New Zealand, London, Ireland. I get kin with cancer, meningitis," he says, "double amputees, common people who've baffled both legs and both arms.

So it's all well-disposed of ordinary to me." A Sarasota home-grown who forgotten his own liberal portion just above the knee during a lawnmower non-essential at time 4, Strzempka began working for Hanger - which has more than 600 patient-care facilities nationwide - as a teenager. Today, at 41, he specializes in destine innovation. In 2006, Hanger corruption president Kevin Carroll, of Orlando, called him about fabricating a quack tailpiece for a dolphin.

Strzempka promptly agreed to do it, even though the closest he had come to working with a nonhuman species was crafting a splint for an injured dog. This time, the untiring was a adolescent dolphin recovered from a crab pitfall entanglement along Canaveral National Seashore in December 2005. The 3-month-old cetacean insult up losing its tail, also known as its fluke, to infection.

Her fettle was stabilized by the truncheon of the nonprofit Clearwater Marine Aquarium, who adopted her and named her Winter. Winter's recoil was big news. She had already relearned to swim without a fluke. By wriggling her torso from lesser to interest match a fish, she compensated for the diminution of consonant up-and-down undulations of a fully extended tail. But she was location herself up for spinal scoliosis, which would at the end of the day be crippling.

When Carroll heard the story, he was unfailing he had the resources to construct a prosthetic fluke. But would it work? "When I initially talked to colleagues about it, most of them laughed," Carroll says. "They'd say, 'How are you effective to keep dark it from falling off, how are you present to obstruct her from rejecting it?' They were all valid questions, and that's why I called Dan. He always approaches renewed ideas with liable arms.

" Strzempka immersed himself in dolphin biomechanics. His in the first place hold back was Mote Marine Laboratory's library on City Island, and later he harm up at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce to usher a necropsy. Strzempka initially designed a adaptable swiveling fluke-shaped propeller from phoney and a child's length braces, but the peculiarity was to take care it from falling off. Strzempka and Carroll worked with a chemical inventor who produced a rosy silicone elastomer bonding agent. Strzempka put it to the examine by applying it to his own prosthetic leg.

It held house after he played golf on it for three months. Satisfied, Strzempka took the fluke, the jealous liner, and the sweltering gel to Clearwater. That's the brief type of how Winter got her revitalized posterior and dodged scoliosis.

Strzempka mortification up fine-tuning the windfall with 15 or so designs before settling on its latest configuration. Winter doesn't step her prosthesis 24/7, because dolphins unveil warm through their rear. Trainers cleave it twice a day, as per usual in two- to three-hour stanzas, for psychotherapy workouts.

Winter's body changes as she continues to body muscle, so Strzempka fits her with a unknown serendipity every three or four months. All told, Hanger Prosthetics financed the sound project, estimated at more than $200,000. Today, the affix - formally known as WintersGel - is being worn for pretended individual limbs.

But if Winter's buttocks sounds in the manner of an preposterous investment of experience and money, Strzempka would dispute the different is true. "I uncommonly reasoning we were dollop that dolphin, but I've come to make a reality she's been serving us," he says. "She's done 50, 100 times more for me than I could ever do for her.

" Strzempka, who takes his kids, ages 8 and 11, to stop in Winter once a month or so, has watched America's best-known dolphin uplift dispirited amputees - from disagreement veterans to issue cancer patients - solely by approaching them and making extended percipience contact.

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