Leon Turnbull Photography

On Saturday, we went out hiking to Chimney Rock at Point Reyes Natl. Seashore. There is a short hike to an elephant seal overlook. It is not the time of year to see elephant seals; a ranger told us that in the spring there are up to 1500 seals here (I definitely must return to see that). Anyway, we did happen to see a couple of male seals here. One was just laying on the beach sleeping. My wife thought he was dead. It turned out that was definitely not the case, because this other guy came swimming up to the beach while we were at the overlook, making a heckuva lot of noise along the way. He slowly swam up to the beach, which promptly woke up the other one, who tried to scamper away from it. It is funny to watch these creatures flop about on the land. It is also funny that they are so bad at sharing. It is a darn big beach. You would think that it would be big enough to comfortably allow two elephant seals to both take a nap. Anyway, they both ended up getting back in the water, and swam away. We were definitely very fortunate to witness these two seals in “action”. This photo was taken with my 100-400mm lens with a 1.4x extender.