Gentle persuasion, general raucous, have been used to move seals away

I have a confession to make.

I have probably violated federal law by harassing an endangered species.

But it happened, like, a real long time ago.

We used to go camping with a huge family at Maha’ulepu each Labor Day weekend, and one of the rituals was laying net in the shallow waters near the campsite just before dusk.

What we would haul in the next morning would be a sizable portion of that night’s dinner, if we were lucky. This was before the law was changed requiring those who lay net in the ocean to check the net every four hours, and not leave it in one place longer than 12 hours.

So when the earliest risers got up with the sun, and saw heads bobbing near the net, we instinctively leaped into the water.

Those endangered Hawaiian monk seals were making breakfast out of our dinner, and we were going to pound on surfboards, yell at the top of our lungs, and swim directly toward them to secure our catch.

They would take their last few bites out of the back ends of the fish, leaving the heads dangling in the net, and disappear into the ocean depths.

A friend of mine, with the assistance of a coconut palm frond, once gently encouraged a monk seal back into the water after he or she had come ashore smack in the middle of a boat ramp.

Recreational and commercial boaters had piled up at the pier, waiting to launch, but were stalled by the monk seal.

So my friend grabbed a frond, shook it in the vicinity of the monk seal, who took the hint, slowly made its way back into the water, and then came out again only a short distance from the boat ramp, enjoying a narrow slice of sandy beach all to itself while resuming its long nap.

And commercial and pleasure craft filed into the water through the vacated boat ramp.

Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).