Playing with a Leopard Seal…..

Cutting through the water in our small, 2-person Kayak, we are suddenly forced to stop. A gargantuan, annoyed leopard seal pops it’s large head out of the water and draws in a sharp–but quite raspy–breath. His reptile-like head glances over at us, and, without missing a beat, slides silently back under the sea, leaving behind nothing but a small plop! as the water fills his spot.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we begin to paddle towards the small opening in the rocks that mark the beginning of our exit from the beautiful Iceberg Graveyard. No one was really nervous about the leopard seal: we’d played with one earlier during our excursion, and no harm had come to anyone. He’d simply rocketed around the group with indescribable ease, turning sometimes 180 degrees on a dime…and then bullet away. A kayaker could only glimpse the leopard seal up close for a few seconds at a time: It would corkscrew professionally underneath their vessel and then zoom out of sight. But, throughout this, there was little fear. The only thing that I thought was a bit unsettling was the lack of power we humans had. This master of the sea (10 ft, 1,200 lbs) could easily tip us without a seconds’ notice, and proceed to do/bite whatever it pleased long before someone could even shout out in alarm.

We continue, slowly, admiring the scenery……when another raspy breath penetrates the silence. But we only have the time to glimpse it’s slick back while he dives under. The Leopard Seal is slowly judging each one of us….and we find it likes to hang out mostly around the smaller/slower members of our contingent. Seeing as I am 13, and my dad and I are stragglers, we fit well into this criteria. The rest of the group begins to fade into the distance while we examine the scenery, take our time, and watch this curious leopard seal circle us. Suddenly a quick, gravelly breath snaps me awake and I look to see him only a couple meters away. He zooms underneath our boat and off into the distance. Then he comes back to linger underneath our boat, bumping up and down against the bottom of it. We rock back and forth lightly and smile as this massive creature continues to thrash about viciously only a matter of inches underneath our powerless bodies.

At this point it is necessary to explain a bit about how a Leopard Seal eats a freshly caught penguin. After catching one, (which probably isn’t too hard as a) they are very smart animals.* b) I have never seen any life-form that large with such explosive speed and untouchable agility.) it will proceed to whack the thing as hard as possible against the water’s surface until, finally, the meat bursts out of it’s skin.

Anyways, we can now feel him biting the bottom of our Kayak, and we are almost completely absorbed in this fantastic interaction while the rest of our team fades away, and we become more and more isolated from the pack–and for those of you who have seen the Water Bufallo video, you know what almost certainly would’ve been the fate of the poor guy who was separated from his pack. My dad nudges me to mention that we should probably be heading back to the group pretty soon, so we begin to paddle again.

But we are distracted.

The guy is doing all sorts of corkscrews around the boat, constantly sizing us (me) up…. and then disappearing. One of these times he leaves for an unusually long time, so we stop to look for him.

Snort!!! His head lurches out of the water, jaws open, a few centimeters from my left arm. A shiver of surprise fizzes through me, and I am paralyzed looking down at him. Before I have time to react, he corkscrews out of sight like a bullet spinning out of a rifle. Gone.

At this point there are two changes: My father and I are both holding our hands much higher out of the water and we have suddenly stopped enjoying this seal to realize that yes, we are far from the group (and, for me, yes I am the smallest one, [he singled us out from the start] and yes, he has been acting this way around us for a reason.).

Our paddling speed has not improved greatly despite our sudden paradigm shift, because our hands are now a combined four sticks in the air with little leveraging power. To add to this, we are constantly sticking our heads over our shoulders to try and locate our pursuant. How far away was he? The answer: not far. But we only knew his general direction from where he was last seen or when we’d last heard him breathe–which he only did occasionally. So we keep going, the tension in our mind still intense as he pops up closer, closer, closer.

We are both looking back at his general direction, and we can feel the tension lessen by about half a degree. But no, we do not stop paddling. However, we are still looking back at the water behind us, so suddenly…..

……we are beached!!!!!!!

We are beached.

A flat rock runs several inches underneath the water almost all the way out to the other rocky area that is the place on the right hand side of our little passageway back to the ship. In front of us, more rock. And behind us is several feet of rock that we slid over while being beached, plus a leopard seal. I curse. We try to push off the rock/paddle off of it using the few inches of water below us. We shake around like heck in our spray skirts. Skirts that prevent easy exit from the kayak; there is no time to pop the skirt and stagger out of the kayak before pushing it off the rock and getting back in, and we shake like never before, as my dad imagines the seal leaping up and taking a chunk out of his shoulder while I don’t think of anything but getting off of the dang rock. I look back and see nothing, no head, no air bubbles, nothing. In a desperate burst of feet-kicking-body-thrusting-head-jerking-arm-flailing-adrenaline, I listen to the sweet sound of a kayak scraping off of a rock into the water. Our kayak. But we don’t even catch a glimpse backwards as we forget the “hands up” rule and paddle, paddle, paddle. Plus more paddling. Finally, I glimpse backwards but not long enough to sight the seal. He could be right beside us. But we keep paddling until we are suddenly in the group again, and then suddenly leading the group. We scan our surroundings and find it satisfyingly Leopard Seal free. I let out a fountain of air and then lean back in the kayak.

There were no more Leopard Seal sightings for the rest of the excursion. We reached a stationed Zodiac, awkwardly clambered out of the kayaks, tied them together and zoomed back to the ship, leaving the Leopard Seal far behind but the memory still fresh in our minds……

*For those of you who have read Endurance, you may recall how one of the smaller crew members would fool the leopard seals into thinking he was a penguin so they could shoot it for the meat. You also may remember the leopard seal who, when the man ran away, followed his shadow from underneath the ice all the way to the other side of the floe to greet him with almost a fatal surprise.

Leland