The stay-at-home dad: Seal attacks and drifting out to sea

Despite a few lessons and plenty of time on local waterways, I wouldn’t count on any of my four kids to swim effectively without a life jacket — not a big deal so long as you approach water activities with safety at the forefront.

With that in mind, I want to clarify that I would never put my children in a position to be harmed. But all parents remember situations in which our kids find themselves on the verge of danger. Luckily, most of these situations turn out fine and wind up being amusing memories of youthful incompetence.

On a trip to the Puget Sound, my wife and I decided to take our four kids kayaking and paddleboarding. With temperatures scorching and (mostly) calm waters, it seemed it would be about as leisurely as a trek on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

If only we had taken our kids out on kayaks on Lake Coeur d’Alene beforehand. Because none of them knew what to do. At all.

We rented two regular kayaks, two stand-up paddleboards and a “kids” kayak, which meant everybody would have their own vessel except our 5-year-old son, who would ride in one of the kayaks with a parent or older sibling.

First of all, I’ve never seen such ignorance when it comes to using a paddle. All the older kids had ridden with a parent in a kayak before, and surely they’ve seen other people and TV shows/movies that demonstrate the very simple act of paddling. Well, forget all that.

In the opening minutes of our boating excursion, I watched my kids dunk paddles, fully submerging into the water and not understanding why that wouldn’t propel their boat forward. Multiple cases of the butterfingers resulted in my wife and I having to chase after several paddles too.

Finally, the kids started to move the boats — in circles.

“You have to alternate between paddling on each side of the boat!” I’d yell.

“What is alternate?!?” they’d yell back.

After an hour, we only managed to get about 10 feet from the launch site.

But hey, everyone was having fun! Eventually, we started to make progress, especially with my two middle kids navigating the stand-up paddleboards by sitting crisscross applesauce and learning how to alternate their strokes. Meanwhile, my oldest daughter, 11, chatted gibberish to herself while slicing through the water in the kids kayak (a boat probably meant for an 8 or 9-year-old at most).

My middle kids, suddenly feeling so confident with their mastery of paddling, thought they could try standing up on their boards. A few screams of terror and a couple more parent-paddle recoveries led to the decision to delay stand-up instruction to another day.

About halfway through, we encountered a family of seals (including an adorable baby seal!) as we traveled through a narrow passage of water between a small island and the mainland. Incredible, I thought, at least until I started to wonder if any orcas might’ve followed them into the area. They don’t call them killer whales for nothing!

These seals, honestly, seemed a little irritated by our presence, or at the very least were adamant about protecting their baby. My 7-year-old daughter just about tipped the kayak when one splashed above the water about two feet in front of her boat, and the entire Puget Sound definitely heard my daughter screech at a level she typically reserves for a loose dog or in-the-house spider sighting.

I tried to get some pictures and video of these seals, and they really didn’t like that. No flash photography, apparently. I’d spend several seconds positioning the kayak just so before laying my paddle on my lap before trying to quickly frame a good shot with my phone camera. On three different occasions, just when I was about to push record, a seal would splash out of the water behind me and startle me into nearly dropping my phone into the depths. My phone survived the trip, thankfully, but I have no visual evidence of this encounter, just as those dastardly seals intended.

Near the end of our excursion, my 5-year-old son desperately wanted to try the kids kayak on his own. So we stopped along the beach and plopped him into the boat by himself, then my wife and I attempted to position our kayaks between him in the water so that we could keep him close.

He loved sitting in the boat on his own, and, unlike the other kids, he had an immediate understanding of how to alternate his paddle strokes on each side of the boat.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the paddles to touch the water. He did an incredible job paddling the air though.

And so this adorable little boy immediately started to drift away in the wind. While the tide was pushing in (we planned for this factor), the strength of the gusts combined with his tiny body and tiny boat sent the boy swiftly out of our reach, though only inches from the actual shore.

Was he in any real danger? Not unless those seals came back to start trouble. Still, we didn’t expect him to be the fastest kayaker in the family, and my wife and I had to work our already melted arms even harder just to keep up with him.

He absolutely loved how “good” he was at paddling the kayak, obviously not knowing at all how much the wind was doing the work. He wanted to keep going and going, not realizing the level of exhaustion his parents had reached after four hours of “keeping children alive” on the seal-infested Puget Sound.

While we didn’t go kayaking any other day of the trip, we did frequently walk back down to the beach from our rental house to the area where we encountered the seals. We spotted them every day, and I felt at least two of them glaring at me, taunting me to go back into their water. I didn’t even try to take a picture of them. I knew what would happen if I tried.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.