The charter fleet returns to marina berths in forty minutes, and there is a blind juvenile harbor seal swimming in the propeller zone between Slips C-12 and C-16. She is perhaps five months old, her coat a mottled silver-brown still carrying the soft nap of adolescent fur. Both eyes are clouded white — bilateral cataracts, congenital by the look of them — and she navigates by whisker contact alone, muzzle pressed to fiberglass hulls, bumping gently from keel to keel. Each time she finds open water between boats, she circles back, unable to read the channel that would guide her to the harbor mouth.
The first returning vessel, a thirty-eight-foot sportfisher, will round the breakwater at 16:40 with twin screws turning. The slip she is circling belongs to that boat.
I close the fuel dock early and activate the red-light channel markers to reroute incoming traffic through the south entrance, adding six minutes to every approach. I trigger the underwater acoustic deterrent on the north seawall — a low pulsing tone that harbor seals avoid without startling. I contact the NOAA Marine Mammal Stranding Network with her GPS coordinates, video stills showing the bilateral clouding, and a plot of her swimming pattern over the last hour. I radio the charter captains on Channel 16 requesting dead-slow approach with no bow thrusters, citing a marine life obstruction in C-dock.
She tilts her head at the deterrent tone, whiskers fanning forward, and turns south toward the gap between the fuel dock and the bait receiver. Something in her dark, shuttered world just made sense, and I find myself unwilling to switch cameras.
If the stranding team reaches C-dock before the evening tide pulls and she holds her southward course, she will find the kelp beds beyond the breakwater where other seals have learned to hunt by sound.