Skomer Island seal

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We snorkelled at Skomer Island and you could snorkel with puffins, which was the motivation to go. However, as you were snorkelling around, other marine life is potentially going to be something you might encounter. And this incredible young grey seal, inquisitive, charming. All of the above, came and spent some time checking us out, and she was so playful and so fun and it’s one of those moments I’ve had with another mammal where you’re looking into their eyes and, you know, they’re a sentient being, and it’s like, who is checking who out here?

Who is the observer? And I love moments like this in nature, because it’s when you get to be in full awe and surrender of the fact that we are all nature, we are all beings. And actually nobody has any power state here because each being is sentient and is inquiring and sussing things out and working out, like, what are you? Are you fun? Are we going to play? Like what’s, what’s happening?

And the people we were with, she’d already swam up to and had a little nibble on their fins. And what seals do is they mouth. That’s how they sense things. So they use their mouths to to suss things out a little bit. So, the fact they’re doing that is like a kind of a kind of a friendly, hello and they’re just sort of sussing you out there. And so we were with her for quite a while, and then she started to play in the kelp, which is really amazing because she’d sort of, like, drop down from the height we were near the surface. It must have been maybe 5 to 8 metres where she was going down to where the kelp was.

And then she’d like, shimmy her rear end into the kelp, and then all the kelp would kind of, like, close in around her head. So all you could see were these beautiful eyes and her nose just poking out. Poking out of the the, kelp. And then you, you know, it’s like she’s kind of, like, blinking, kind of coy and demure, and then she just shoot out like a kind of her full body length and then do a little kind of swim around as if she’d, like, made you surprised. And then she repeated that quite a few times. So it was really amazing to like, witness that and have that fun and that interaction with her and one of the moments she came up, she was just sort of lifting up towards the surface. And I just love the minimalism of the, you know, the the flow of her looking up and looks like she’s going to surface to take a breath and it was just. Yeah, such a moment. And yeah, I love seals. I volunteer with BDMLR to support and rescue seals and they’re really, really, really special beings.