A Passion for Seals
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to visit Maine for a kayak camping trip was to have the company of my favorite marine mammal (the seal) in the water with me while I was paddling.
The last time I had been to Maine was about ten years ago. I was with family and only got out for a one day paddle during the trip. We visited Bar Harbor and Acadia National park. I remembered how beautiful it was and how much I enjoyed my time on the water there except that I had only been able to see one seal in the water for a brief moment while friends of mine had seen seals "everywhere" on their trip that same year. So when Susan and I discussed Maine as a possible destination for a kayaking trip I let her know what my hopes/expectations were in terms of seal sightings. Susan dutifully, while doing her research for the trip, made a point of choosing locations for paddling and camping that were known to have the largest number of seals or greatest chances for sightings.
I should tell you flat out. I love seals. I love the way they move through the water, how they flip flop about on land and bask in the sun on rocks, how their cute little shining heads pop out of the water and how they stare at you with their deep shining soulful black eyes while following your kayak from a cautious distance.
There is a lot of folk lore, mainly from Celtic cultures, about seals shedding their skins on land to transform into humans. These particular changelings are called ‘Selkies’ (also spelled ‘Selchies’) and are often referred to as ‘the People of the Sea.’ When you watch seals in the wild and see some of their human like movements, it's easy to understand how these legends may have come about. But the most interesting theory as to how these stories got started is chronicled in a book called: ‘Seal-Folk and Ocean Paddlers’ by John M. MacAulay. In the book, MacAulay traces the origins of these tales to the real life events of kayakers from Greenland and Norway making their way by kayak to Ireland, Scotland and the British Isles, shedding their seal skin boats on land to ‘become human’ and intermarrying with locals; hence the still rumored geneology of certain families descended from Selkies. I was shocked to discover that one of those family names, Nolan, is one of my ancestor’s family name!
Because of my passion for seals I also did a lot of self-directed studying of seals over the years, both in the wild, at rescue centers (I worked at a seal rescue center in the Orkney Islands), and through books/films. So seeing seals in Maine on this trip was not my first time, but it had been a few years since I had seen them so it was wonderful to encounter them again.
When the tide is high many of the ledges the seals prefer to beach on disappear completely under the water. The tide doesn’t always have to be at the highest point for this to happen. Those first days of the trip we happened to paddle mainly during the high tide (which was during daylight hours) and arrive back at camp at low tide (so that we had to carry our boats back up the island the farthest distance of course!) when we would have had a better chance of seeing seals hauled out. Fortunately the times of the tides changed by about an hour each day and by the end of our trip we were able to paddle in day light at low tide and see seals hauled out on ledges. As it turned out we had the greatest number of seal sightings at Stonington, even though we hadn’t expected Stonington to have that many seals (seals were not generally mentioned in Susan’s reading material as being something to look out for in Stonington).