As my kayaking skills have improved, I’ve been able to pursue increasingly exotic interests. Lately, I’ve gotten into marine mammals, and not just the familiar inshore species. Far offshore, the deep, oceanic waters have been described as a blue-water “Serengeti.” Each year, herds of marine mammals migrate through these remote waters, all but unknown to people ashore. One such extraordinary marine species is the northern fur seal.

The northern fur seal is a truly pelagic animal. It is almost never seen ashore except during breeding. It breeds only on a handful of islands in the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, and, in recent decades, the Channel Islands and Farallons off California. By far the majority of the fur seal’s lifecycle is spent at sea, foraging for squid along the 100-fathom (180 m) isobath.

Here in Washington, as in most parts of the world, the 100-fathom isobath lies beyond the edge of the continental shelf break. This is truly the open ocean, not mere coastal waters. Along most of the coast, the shelf break lies approximately thirty to forty miles (50–65 km) offshore. Fortunately for us fur seal-watchers, however, the otherwise-distant continental shelf is indented in several locations by undersea canyons. These canyons create deep water relatively close to shore—close enough to be reachable by kayak.

Juan de Fuca Canyon is the most accessible of the undersea canyons. At its closest approach off Cape Flattery, Juan de Fuca Canyon’s eastern rim is less than ten miles (16 km) offshore. Hoping to spot some fur seals, I set off by kayak from the Makah Indian Reservation.

The fur seal’s habit of foraging far offshore is only one of the inconveniences it inflicts on would-be seal-watchers. Another is its migratory nature. Fur seals must arrive on their breeding grounds by summer if their pups are to have any chance of survival. The Pribilof Islands breeding grounds are almost 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from Washington. To reach the Pribilofs in time, fur seals must migrate through Washington waters in March, or the first week of April at the latest. Unfortunately for kayakers, extratropical cyclones are common in Washington waters during March. Offshore kayaking is hazardous this time of year due to the likelihood of strong winds.

To make matters worse, fur seals are nocturnal. They forage at night and surface at dawn to sleep. This means a kayaker’s best hope of seeing them is to arrive on the continental shelf break at sunrise, when the seals are at their most exhausted. To achieve a dawn arrival, the kayaker must launch from the beach an hour or two after midnight to allow sufficient travel time to reach the shelf break. Hobuck Beach is famous for its surf break, so the kayaker must launch through the surf in the middle of the night.

The kayaker can make things a little easier on himself by choosing a night near a full moon, so the surf and waves will be more visible. The downside to a full moon, however, is that the tidal currents off Cape Flattery will be running at their most powerful. Cape Flattery is noted in the U.S. Coast Pilot and NOAA chart no. 18485 for producing “particularly heavy” tide rips well offshore. The seal-seeking kayaker will be facing these tide rips at night.

I am not the first paddler to struggle against the many obstacles the fur seals impose. In ancient times, the Quileute Indians tell us, fur seal hunting was considered to be real t’axilitowaskwa: “work that requires a strong spirit power.” Expert weather forecasters would stay up late “during the March moon,” monitoring sea and sky conditions from a hilltop outside the village to determine if it was safe to launch. If so, the sealers would “leave the village before daylight, about one or two o’clock in the morning” to get out to the foraging grounds at daybreak—just as I did a century and a half later. Despite the Quileute’s practical and spiritual precautions, not every man who set out fur seal hunting would return.

Besides ancient Indian lore, my other best source of information on fur seals was the 1898 report of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Commission on Fur Seal Investigations. This multi-volume analysis was prepared in the course of the decades-long, international Bering Sea controversy (ultimately resolved through the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911). The American agents assigned to the fur seal research project gathered ships’ logs from 123 different sealing vessels. They then painstakingly plotted the locations of each ship’s fur seal catches, with the individual catches color-coded by month. The result of their labors was an honest-to-god nineteenth-century GIS of the fur seal migration! The 1898 sealing data confirmed the earlier, oral traditions of the Quileute Indians: March or possibly the first week of April would be the best time to find fur seals off Washington.

Night-time kayaking off the Washington coast is no joke. I made half a dozen failed attempts to reach the canyon from Hobuck Beach in March 2022, March 2023, and March 2024. There are no trip reports for these failures, because there are no pictures. The failures all occurred at night. Alone on the water, exposed to worsening sea conditions, I grew increasingly anxious until I turned back each time.

My repeated defeats were the product of a combination of adverse conditions. No single issue would have been insurmountable on its own, but in their totality, the circumstances were overwhelming: high surf throughout Makah Bay, including breakers well offshore; clapotis rebounding off the cliffs of Cape Flattery; tide races extending downstream of the offshore islands; strong winds and chop; and periods of heavy rain, during which the moon would be wholly obscured, plunging me into a profound and frigid darkness that my headlamp could not penetrate. Chasing the fur seals was proving, indeed, to be real t’axilitowaskwa.

The winning strategy was to launch from Neah Bay instead of Hobuck. A launch from Neah Bay avoided the surf at Hobuck and the dangerous breakers in Makah Bay, and also placed me farther offshore of Cape Flattery, reducing my exposure to tide rips and clapotis. Launching from Neah Bay increased the one-way paddling distance to fourteen miles (22 km), for a roundtrip of twenty-eight miles (45 km), but that only meant I had to leave earlier in the evening. I also had to be more cognizant of the tidal currents, as Neah Bay opens directly onto the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which is subject to currents that can stop a kayaker in his tracks.