⏰ 1330 hours

📅 September 2024

📍 Monterey Bay, California, 36°31'37.0"N 121°55'35.0"W

🌡️ Water Temperature: 51ºF / 10.5ºC

Monterey Bay has two summers: pre-summer summer, and post-summer summer. The cold, nutrient-rich water sucked to the sea surface by the springtime upwelling winds that blow throughout March and April react with the warming air to create our beloved marine layer—the daily fog that blankets the coast, especially throughout Memorial and Labor days. The shoreline clouds that nourish the parched redwood forests and the wallets of seaside sweater sellers are often referred to as “May Gray,” “June Gloom,” “July Why,” and “Fogust,” depending on the month.

With the winds will eventually come a fleet of leviathans to feast well into fall—the great whales. These whales and their marine mammalian counterparts feed on the bounty of photosynthetic plankton brought up from the depths via upwelling.

Today is a little different though—it’s a balmy, sunny and decidedly sweaty second-summer September day. I make my way from the parking lot over the berm at Monastery Beach. Lake-like conditions beckon me into my home waters.

I descend into some murk at depth and watch as my buddies Eric and Sage fade into the greenery. An explosion of fried-egg jellies Phacellophora camtschatica rises from the deep, with plentiful baby butterfishes sheltering in their tentacles, and a few Thetys giant salp chains pass us by.

Eventually, I retreat to the shallows for better viz and potential sunballs breaking through the kelp canopy. I make my way past Eric, on the lookout for rockfish schools, when I feel it: that unmistakable feeling that someone is watching me.

A small shadow disappears behind a boulder, aiming at my backside. I drift to a stop, eyes narrowing as I ready my camera, fingers hovering over the shutter lever. I feel a small tug on my right fin, then my left. I steady my breathing and prepare my mind. In these situations, you often only get one shot. Suddenly I feel my assailant clawing its way down my fin and to my foot. It’s now, or never.

“Aww, who’s a cutie patootie widdle baby?” I whisper as I flip my camera around and snap selfie after seal-fie with a harbor seal pup shell-bent on figuring out just what in the world is this bubbly beast. The seal pup snaps out of its investigative reverie to find me staring at it.

Related Reading: Swimming With Whale and Basking Sharks

Mom likely gave birth to this blubbery bundle of joy sometime back at the start of the upwelling season around April or May. She then nursed the pup for just 24 days before its graduation into a full-time self-sufficient seal, just in time for the midsummer festivities to begin. And come August and September, with bettering dive conditions, the now months-old pinniped and the rest of its adorable cohort have the opportunity to come and study us scuba divers, up close and personal, all over the Monterey Peninsula. It’s a blessed time of the year.

I snap a few more shots and the seal decides to peel away and reevaluate the situation.

Harbor seals, unlike their barky and brash sea lion brethren, are like aquatic cats. One must prove themselves worthy of their attention. But appear too needy—no dice. Said differently for this Gen Alpha pupperoni: You’ve got to pass the vibe check. But once chosen, there are few feelings more purely wonderful than a harbor seal using your equipment as a case study for humanity’s maladaptivity to the aquatic world. Front flipper scritches, full-face vibrissae embraces, flips and twirls to cover all the angles.

Sometimes it’s like they’re trying to free your feet from their finned confines, scratching and chewing and clawing in the most adorable case of phocid viciousness.

I’ve had a few such encounters over the years, but soon the seal loses interest, and I head back to the beach snapping my kelp and starfish photos with my last few breaths before breaking the surface.

One final turn back reveals a curious bowling-ball head following me from beyond the canopy, the pups’ final back roll coinciding with my first steps back up the berm. The rest of the day is spent basking in the warmth of that little seal’s approval. I can’t wait for next year’s post-summer summer.