Saturday December 21, 2024 - The upcoming holiday week will once again find us on a trip far from Narragansett bay. However, the tide timing for seal observation does not get good until after Christmas day. After Christmas the low tide will be suitable for seal watching in the morning and if the weather looks cooperative, we may return to Rhode Island next weekend to enjoy some seal watching fun.

I was warned before I retired that I would find myself busily occupied with all manner of activities, and it seems that semi-retirement has indeed turned out to be a very busy time for me. So far this season, we have done less seal watching than any year since 2000, and this aspect of our current lifestyle is not to our liking. We miss our nature adventures of all types greatly, and hope that in 2025 we will find more opportunities spend more time with the seals and our seal seeking friends.

We took a look at our past seal counts back in April, as we were curious when we had last seen over 150 seals on the rocks at Rome Point. It turns out that March 27, 2021 was the last seal count that exceeded the 150 seal benchmark, and we have to go back to spring 2018 to see multiple consecutive counts of greater than 150 seals. We were aware that the past several seasons we have been seeing fewer seals than we have in years past, and some of that can be accounted for considering the lower number of observations that we made during the Covid years of 2020 and 2021. Spring 2022 and 2023 were very busy years for our small business which resulted in less free time for seal watching during those spring seasons, which is a factor that makes drawing conclusions from our observation records more uncertain. Still, we would assert that there are not as many seals making there home in Narragansett Bay as there were 10 years ago, for reasons that we continue to ponder as our seal counts gradually become slightly lower each season.

The links below connect to short seal videos we posted on YouTube for your seal watching amusement.  Seal Pup Follies was recorded in Maine in June 2012 and Linebelly Rising is a short clip showing the former Rome Point kingpin climbing to the top of his favorite pointy rock.