Sea Lion Pup Was Just Looking For A Crash Pad

Photo credit: CarsonTravels.us

Sea lions along the west coast…what’ll be next?

We’ve seen them wondering well inland, ending up in the back of police cars and stealing someone’s catch-of-the-day.

Add breaking into someone’s boat in the middle of the night and passing out…while the owner was on board.

Michael Duffy was on his 41-foot Kettenburg boat “Elixir” at the San Diego Yacht Club when he was awaken at 2:30AM last Sunday morning to the sound of sneezing and snoring.

Duffy thought the sounds was from a buddy who came aboard after a night out, but he could not find anyone. He heard the noise again a few hours later, with the morning light.

To his surprise, he saw a 35-pound sea lion pup on another bunk, curled up like a dog on top of his clothes.

Duffy told the Associated Press, “It was a tiny little guy, and I was kind of shocked, but he was basically asleep,” Duffy said, guessing it was a male. “Then he heard me coming, so he kind of looked up a little bit like when a dog is sleeping and you want to wake it up and it doesn’t want to wake up.”

Duffy took a photo of the pup, who had already jumped down onto the cabin floor.

“You gotta go buddy, go…go, go, go,” Duffy said, as he filmed, softly coaxing the baby sea lion back up the stairs, off the boat and into the water.

“He was extremely well behaved, except for his loud snoring and sneezing,” Duffy said. “He was looking at me, and I was like ‘you gotta go.'”

The sea lion pup had an orange tag on its flipper, indicating it had recently been rescued and released by SeaWorld San Diego as part of their rescue operations for the massive number of seal lion strandings along the southern California coast.

After their brief encounter, Duffy nicknamed the pup “Gilligan” after the character from Gilligan’s Island who The Skipper called his little buddy.

Check out the full story about this strange encounter on The Huffington Post.