Sealed Fate – Part 4

This is a multi-part story. Read part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | epilog

Day 3 (continued). 30 minutes after the pup went missing, he’s back and he’s swimming with all his might to fight the current. And the fog is clearing. I message Jessica that the fog is lifting on my end of the strait and there seems to be good visibility at boat level now.

We see an aluminum “park-ranger”-looking boat motor toward us. The current is very swift. They ask where the pup is and we point to the back of our boat. The pup is swimming with all his might to keep behind our swim step. We have our dinghy in the water, tied to the back as well, so we tell the rescue guy (we didn’t get his name because everything happened so fast) to hop into our dinghy and we’ll pull him up to our boat.

The rescue was probably the easiest they’ve ever done. The man stood on our swim step, put a fishing net behind the pup, and just scooped him up. This is the point where Sean decides to inject himself into the rescue, helping to get the pup out of the net and wrapped in a towel. The man stepped back into our dinghy and the rescue boat came alongside and he handed the pup to his partner, who put the pup into an animal crate. It all just took a few minutes!

Phew! We are so happy to hand the responsibility onto a team that can get this little guy some help. I really think it was last-chance timing for him.

The rescue team picks up a second stranded baby seal on the way back to Friday Harbor and delivers them both to Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (donate here if you wish) on San Juan Island. They tell me the pup was extremely exhausted and cold from being in the water that long and was still sleeping when they left Wolf Hollow.

After evaluation, they found he (yes, it is a male) is hypothermic, dehydrated, underweight, and weak. They estimate he is only 4 days old, so was just a day or so old when we first saw him. Pups weigh about 24 lbs at birth and gain 1.1 – 1.3 lbs per day during the first month of life. So my pup should have weighed about 28 lbs on rescue day. He weighed only 18 lbs. Rather than growing like a well-fed pup, he’d lost 25% of his birth weight in his first 4 days of life!

Stay tuned for the final part 5 of this series for a follow-up on how he did in the rehab facility.

Thanks for reading!