Walking with Seals

This morning Mr Click had to go out for a while so I decided to use the time I had to myself to take Tara for a walk. Originally we'd planned to walk her to Kerrycroy together, but once we left the house (after a false start when I forgot to put her collar on and only realised when I had nothing to clip her lead to) I decide to let Tara pick our route.

As you can see, she did a pretty good job of choosing the route. We had a little meander around the area where the bird hide is (right around the mile mark). Tara was desperate to get down onto the beach there but it wasn't a great spot; we would've had a bit of a jump and then there wasn't actually much down there except for slippery seaweed covered rocks.

So we kept on going. At each break in the plants along the route to the beach Tara would stop and look at me as if to say 'can we go down now, mum?' and I had to shake my head because I didn't fancy breaking a leg on the walk.

Until she finally found a good spot to get down onto the beach. She practically took off and then couldn't believe her ears when I even allowed her to go into the water. It was pure coincidence that I let her go paddle just as it started spotting with rain; I figured if we were both going to get wet, she might as well have a bit of fun while she was doing it.

But what was a little weird was that she didn't seem overly keen to go too far into the water.

Since she's discovered that she can swim we have a devil of a time trying to actually get her out of the water. She bobbed in a couple of times to retrieve some seaweed but then decided she had had enough and started leading me up the beach.

And that's when I got that feeling like I was being watched.

Except I knew there was no one else around because the beach had been totally deserted when we got down onto it and no one had joined us there.

I looked back at the water and suddenly realised that a couple of the rocks in the water weren't rocks at all. There were about seven seals gliding by on the water, about fifteen feet away from us, and several of them had stopped to have a look at us.

These photos actually make it look as though we were further away from them than we were.

There was one very large one (who is in the centre of the first photo but bobbed under the water slightly), who seemed quite brave and didn't mind us taking a couple of steps back down the beach towards them. That was, until Tara had a little shake and startled them. Then they all popped down under the water.

We just stood there for a while watching them watching us. I think they were more interested in Tara than me, or perhaps they thought we were there to steal their prime beach lounging spot.

After a while Tara started leading me along the beach and to my surprise, the seals were following us. I think some of them fell behind but there were a good three or four who were with us right the way until we left the beach.

I think they were just escorting us away.

It felt truly magical.