The seal nursery

I think we’re anchored in the middle of a seal nursery.  Its hard to come up with another explanation. 

We’ve been semi-involved with Malcolm’s haulout, finishing up last night with dinner at Malcolm’s place.  We felt like imposters because neither of us did much to help with the real work of the haulout.  Most of our time yesterday was consumed with driving up to Comox & back.  But we got an invite to supper anyway.

The trip to Comox was so we could visit Dick and Olive who we met years ago in Alamos.  When we met him Dick frequently referred to how old he was and how he needed to travel to Mexico every chance he got because he couldn’t have many years left.  Now we’re 15+ years later and he’s still singing the same tune.  It’s a little more believable now but he still doesn’t look ready for the grim reaper.  He told us that his doctor told him he had bowel cancer but likely it wasn’t worth operating on because he was so old.  “Cut it out” was Dick’s response and he looks to be pretty well recovered from that ordeal.  Both of them are our inspiration for aging creatively and actively.  They’re about to leave for 3 weeks in Hawaii so we had to go now or miss them.

This morning we hung out at the dock, had lunch and then got away mid-afternoon.  We’ve got a favorite prawning grounds which is where we are tonight.  We dropped the traps at the mouth of the bay in about 180 feet of water and then went up to the head of the bay to anchor.  That turned into an ordeal which makes it twice in a row now that we’ve had trouble getting the Sarca to bite.  The first time we ended up pulling it back up and trying the whole exercise over again.  Based on the mud on one fluke it looked like it had laid over on its side and dragged along the bottom which it isn’t supposed to be able to do because it has a rollbar specifically to prevent that from happening. 

While we were fighting with the anchor Marilyn commented on the seal barking she could hear.  Once we finally got the anchor set and could look around we first noticed a group of about 5 or 6 seals that appear to be floating together on their backs.  They may even be having a little nooky – I’m not acquainted with exactly how seals do that.  We watched them for a while and then realized that much deeper in the bay, probably in 10 feet or less of water, there’s a whole herd of seals hanging out.  Marilyn is convinced that there’s babies in the herd – I’m not so sure but there’s definitely a crowd hanging out here. 

Tonight I made some absolutely incredible lentil soup.  We happened to have a ham bone and I wanted to make green lentil soup with the bone.  It turned out we didn’t have any green lentils so I made it with red splits.  And the end result is like the best habitant split pea soup I have ever tasted.  All I did was put the ham bone, a lot of red splits, half a diced onion and some water in the crock pot for the afternoon.  At one point I added a few glugs of merlot that we happened to have left over and I seasoned it with a lot of fresh ground pepper, nothing else.  It couldn’t be much simpler and it couldn’t be any better.