Night before last, Helen took me down to the piers at the San
Francisco Bay to have dinner with a group of her friends on the Festina Lente,
a sailboat owned by a married couple she counts among her friends.
Though a bit cool, the night could not have been calmer. More importantly, the group of Helen’s
friends gathered there—a mix of people from Poland, Italy, India, and here in
America—could not have been more accommodating.
We ate our dinner and sipped at drinks on deck of the boat as the
city of San Francisco slowly darkened and the tall buildings began to sparkle
with light. The reflections of the
buildings flexed gently in the water all around us.
An unusual and striking quiet pervaded on the water there just
below the city on the hills. That is…until
someone or something disturbed some sea lions lounging on the docks near the
slip where the sailboat was moored.
A Sea lion, when agitated, can sound more like a dog barking than an
actual dog sounds like a dog barking. If
that is a possible thing.
Just after we had finished our dinner, a ruckus that sounded like a
hound dog treeing a raccoon erupted against the calm.
I honestly thought something had disturbed a dog near a boat in one
of the slips near us.
“Sea lions,” one of the dinner guests said.
“Let’s get flashlights and check them out,” someone else
suggested.
With that, a half dozen of us slinked off the sailboat and walked
down to the end of the dock, probing all the while at the darkness with flashlights
and smartphones. Sure enough, there at
the very end of the docks we found three dogs the sea.
Posted are a couple photographs I managed with my
smarter-than-me-phone.
Boats along the
Docks
Our Sea Lion
Neighbors
—Mitchell Hegman
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