Baby Seals Conquer Dave Jones' Locker

We got up early this morning-- and it was COLD-- and we headed a few minutes up the road to Hancock Point Kayak Tours, which is an old coot named Antoine's house . . . Ant, as he is called, is a Master Sea Kayak guide and he really knows his stuff . . . but he does not fool around during the safety discussion; our family was joined by another group of four-- two moms and their respective kids-- and Ant got right down to business: he explained the sequence of steps required to enable the red DISTRESS button on his radio-- which he keeps in his pocket because in 2016 a Maine kayak guide and one of the folks on his tour drowned and died-- and so he just wanted to get the worst-case scenario out of the way . . . if he drowned and died and we were able to latch onto his hypothermic corpse, we could then grab the radio out of his front pocket and call for help . . . and then he went right into the protocol for if you make a grave error and flip the kayak and need to pull your spray skirt loose and get yourself out from under the boat . . . my family found the grim start to his talk kind of amusing but it made one of the mom's very nervous-- she asked how often this sort of stuff happened and she looked and sounded quite anxious-- and we found out this was for good reason; she was a widow-- and her son was only fourteen-- and she had a rough time during COVID as a single mom with two teenagers-- and in 2018 her cousin-- A Norfolk Academy/William and Mary guy that some of my friends knew-- drowned in a riptide trying to swim out to his daughter-- so Ant's speech probably unnerved her a bit, but it turned out that the double sea kayaks were very stable-- Catherine and I managed to steer ours fairly proficiently, and Alex and Ian were such quick paddlers that they had to continually be called back to the group; we took a trip to Bean Island and then to the rocky shoals beyondy, which were full of seals-- so everyone had a fantastic time, despite the cold weather-- and then. just when it couldn't get any more scenic, we saw a couple baby seals on the rocks and needless to say, they were very very cute . . . cute enough to erase any memories of the rather dark safety speech that began the journey.