sea lion

I’m getting better at surfing. I've been doing it for a few years now. Every month or so, my partner and I drive and then ferry and then drive again out to Tofino for a quick surf trip. It's been long enough to feel comfortable paddling out into the deeper ocean, dodge waves I can’t catch, and get wrecked only about half the time I give a big one an earnest try. Out in the chilly northern pacific waters I don’t look like the Blue Crush surfer my teenage self imagined I might one day be. In the thick full-body wetsuit you need to stay warm out here, I look more like a drenched selkie slapping around rough waters than a cool surfer girl who is one with the ocean. Harsh winds and unruly waves like this aren’t uncommon up here. It's not ideal, but does it make you appreciate even the most mid conditions. On Friday and Saturday of my most recent trip the waves were pretty decent, but by Sunday morning the vibes were off.

The waves themselves were manageable enough - clean, predictable, and not so frequent that you couldn’t paddle out beyond the breaks. But they were steep and crashing hard directly onto shore. If you rode them for too long you would get pummelled straight into the sand, and if you're unlucky dislocate a shoulder. Unlike the previous few days, this Sunday morning I'm a little unsettled. Even small waves can look like a tsunami coming at me if they’re steep and dark enough.  So when I’m out there that morning, I swim out farther than I typically might to stay clear of the harsh breaks and the beginner surfers in shallower waters. Steep waves like this are a big challenge for me, timing them is more difficult, and timing them wrong has worse consequences. When you're trying to catch a wave, you're oriented forward, paddling hard while the wave advances. You don't want to turn around too much or you'll lose momentum, so it's best to just judge when to stand by feeling the wave pushing you forward. Keeping your back to a nice wave is okay; if you miss, usually it'll just pass under you. Keeping your back to a steep wave is a disaster. Time it wrong or paddle too slow and it will crash directly on top of you. You get pushed under and tossed around, sea water rushes up your nose, and it feels like chaos until the wave passes. On this particular Sunday morning with these particularly steep waves, I am cautious. When I do catch a wave, I stay up for just a moment and then bail, gracefully flailing backwards into the water before it has a chance to slam me into the ground.

The waves are better in the afternoon. They're still a bit steep and tricky to catch, but no longer sharply crashing on the shore. We paddle out beyond the breaks and sit on our boards for a little rest in the half-sunshine between sets. Most of surfing is sitting and waiting and rocking back and forth with the waves. I like it a lot; it's more relaxing than it is boring. Sometimes I like to throw a fake temper tantrum for my partner's benefit when the water is too still, banging my fists on the surface like a toddler. When you're sitting on your board lilting in the waves as you look for a suitable one, repetitive songs and phrases tend to burrow themselves in your head. I am out there, gently drifting with I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THE RAAAILROAD looping through my thoughts, when somebody says something I can’t quite make out. I whip my head around to see a surfer a bit inward of me is pointing towards the water to the left of me. A large puppy dog head was poking out.

Usually when I see puppy dog heads in the ocean, they're sweet little harbour seals. The seals are curious and playful, and really a lot of fun. They act and look so much like puppies it's shocking they aren't closely related. Seals will bob up and down with you in the waves, their wet fur sleek and dark. I often wonder if maybe, in our black full-body wetsuits, they think we might be one of them. I love seeing seals, and often end up getting smashed in the face by waves I don’t even notice because I am playfully barking at the seal while it puzzles over what I am and how long we should hang out.

The waves continue to be a little challenging. I shift my focus back to trying to catch one of them because they all keep passing under me. When I first started surfing I thought it would be like snowboarding, but it's a different beast altogether. Snow conditions can change a bit - icy, powder, slush - but once you’re familiar with the terrain you know what to expect. Waves are never identical. You can’t practice on the same wave, so when you learn, you need to learn to adapt to this variability as well. This is something I struggle with; you need to cede some control to the ocean, read the waves rather than master how to catch every one. Ceding control to the ocean is recognising that it is unpredictable and lawless and does not care about your safety because it is not a thing that cares. For what I do, surfing is not a dangerous sport. But I'm a little ashamed to admit that sometimes I am afraid out there. I have caught some of my best waves because there is a bigger wave behind it and I got scared.

Most days, including today, I don’t feel the kind of visceral, instinctual fear that I used to with large waves. I sit up on my board, let the railroad tunes waft back into my head, and sit out the next handful of waves. I am relaxed and in my lane, warm in my brand new wetsuit. Then I see the sea lion again. I have moved away from it, but now it's closer than it was before. Maybe we are simply going in the same direction, but I am getting a little bit nervous. I’ve never been this close to a sea lion. It takes me in for just a second and then tilts its head straight upward and lets out the long roar that earned the species their name. This is also a new experience for me; I’ve only ever heard them roar at the Vancouver Aquarium. In that controlled environment, the roar sounds like a long, sustained burp from a deeply unserious animal. Out in the wild it is very unsettling. Why am I being yelled at.
This is fine, I try to reassure myself. Usually in a little run-in with wildlife like this I would comfort myself with the idea that the animal is more afraid of me than I am of it. But this is not the case for me today. The >1000 lb screaming slab of muscle and fat that can zip through the water at speeds up to 40 km/hr is not more afraid of me than I am of it, because it is not afraid of me at all. My heart starts to race just a little bit; the world in which I end up with a sea lion bite is starting to feel a little bit closer. I snap my arms and legs up out of the water and onto my board and lie flat like an idiot, as if it couldn’t easily bump me off. In fact, at no point has the thought that my surfboard is not a safe haven entered my brain. I look around, scanning the water in every direction. The sea lion has gone down again and the coast looks clear-ish (unless it is directly under me, which I do not want to think about). At this point it is not enough to just swim away from the sea lion and continue to enjoy the surf. I decide to risk putting my arms back in the water so I can paddle into shore.

        When I worse at surfing, my biggest struggle was always paddling out from shore. You can get stuck inwards from where the waves are breaking and it is hard to get past them into the deeper water. Especially if they’re short-period, the broken waves keep pushing you into shore faster than you can move past them. But I currently seem to be going through the opposite problem. Every time I paddle forward, the incoming wave pulls me out further and passes right under me before I can even try to ride it in. They aren't really pushing me in at all, I'm more-or-less staying stationary. Despite this, I keep paddling, slapping at the water with greater urgency.

             Once again, the sea lion emerges from the water like a slow torpedo. When seals come out of the water, they surface slowly from the top of their head, breathe out loudly with their little snoots, and peek their giant eyes at you. Adorable. Sea lions, however, slowly rise straight up with their heads tilted fully back and their noses up in the air. They come up remarkably far, too, getting their full necks out of the water. Then they lower their heads and level up with you. It’s intimidating, and it feels disproportionately sinister for their endearing faces. This sea lion is looking straight at me with its big shiny black eyes, this time closer than it was before. And this time I also notice that, a bit further away, there is a second smaller sea lion. A lady.

    The three of us get into a little bit of a rhythm. I swim away, they swim closer. The female is clearly less invested in me, which I don’t mind. Occasionally I get a roar out of the big boy. We keep this up for a few rounds before, terrifyingly, the dog snout and thick whiskers rise out of the water next to me. RIGHT next to me, close enough that the whiskers brush against my board. Close enough that if I reached out I could’ve pet it. Given the sweet puppy dog head and gentle eyes and tiny little ear flap, this is tempting. However, I am not a woman who wants a sea lion bite. I have just bought this expensive new wetsuit like 2 hours ago and I do not want to go BACK to the shop and tell them I need another one.

           While sea lions can be aggressive, they are also very social, intelligent, and playful, just like seals and otters. Sometimes they’ll goof around with scuba divers, slapping the goggles off their face repeatedly or nipping and pulling at their flippers in games that are very irritating to the divers and very fun for the sea lions. Despite their oblong shape and awkward waddling movements on land, they swim gracefully, powered by their strong foreflippers. Their motions are natural and agile while they zip around underwater.

        In many places, humans coexist closely with sea lions. California sea lions will take over popular beaches, gathering in giant colonies to lie around on the sand. In the Galapagos, sea lions are frequent visitors to the fish markets, where they waddle around like golden retrievers begging for handouts. When distressed California teenager Kevin Hines jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and found himself badly injured in the water, a sea lion supported his body and waited with him until the coast guard arrived. They have hurt and a few times killed people, but that isn’t representative of their relationship with humans. We are, for the most part, on good terms.

   But a particularly bad time to cross an adult male would be during mating season. Maybe you can guess what time of year it is when I encounter the sea lion and his lady friend. Here I am, all limbs huddled on my board again while a puppy-faced behemoth is within petting distance. I am doing my absolute best not to panic, but my heart is fully racing now and my stomach is sick. I have to ride a wave to shore and I simply cannot keep missing them. Everything in me is screaming not to submerge my arms again and lose a finger, but I gotta go. A few waves pass underneath me before I force my tired arms to paddle fast enough, position myself well enough, to finally catch one.

   It was great. The wave felt enormous and I had better balance and focus than I ever have. Adrenaline is incredible. My mind is screaming DO NOT FALL. ABSOLUTELY DO NOT FALL while it is also vaguely whispering ALL THE LIVELONG DAY. I don’t fall. I confidently ride the wave into shore. When the water is shallow enough, I run onto dry sand without turning back. My partner is standing there looking deeply concerned. “Did you know,” he asks, “that there was a sea lion right next to you?”

He describes what he saw from shore. In one of the waves I missed, the imposing silhouette of the sea lion’s body rose beside me, within arm’s distance. He said it was cool, but very creepy. While I’d been paddling away from the sea lion thinking I was putting some real distance between us, the sea lion was swimming along right next to me. If I had tumbled on that wave like I was afraid of doing, there’s a decent chance I would’ve fallen directly onto the back of the sea lion. I don’t know if he would’ve bitten me for that, but I can’t imagine he would’ve loved it.

My partner and I walk to a safe distance away from the sea lions, but still close enough to keep an eye on them. There’s a cluster of other surfers over here; I feel a lot safer now that I’m not alone. If the sea lion followed me all the way out here, I’d have to assume it’s personal. Revenge for interrupting his date I guess. But he didn’t follow me. I spent the rest of our time out there continually scanning the water for their puppy heads. I saw them periodically rise up around the same spot, not advancing at all. From time to time the male would roar. But by now I was out of his hair, and he was out of mine. We both go on living our lives.

       The next morning my partner and I pack up our clothes and our still-wet surf gear. We split some sweet potato fries on the ferry back home to Vancouver and watch the mountains drift by. Next summer, the sea lion couple will probably have a pup. Maybe the female was already pregnant when I met her. She and the pup will stay together until the summer after that, snuggling and bonding and, when it's ready, the baby will learn how to swim. It’ll play with the other pups, it'll flop around in the waves, it’ll nurse, and it’ll be protected fiercely by its parents who came so close to me. Female Steller sea lions can live up to 30 years, and males up to 20 years. I hope that these two do. Maybe I’ll see them again the next time I’m out there. I’ll look.