The sea lions have begun roaming up and down Lynn Canal in noisy gangs. They pass back and forth in front of our homestead most months of the year, alone, in pairs, or groups of 3-5. Suddenly, we’re seeing groups of 10 or more individuals. It’s another sign that the herring are about to arrive. They may even be entering our waters now—on Wednesday a number of them suddenly began leaping out of the water, a sign that they’re hunting.
The first time we saw this kind of behavior was about this time in 2007. One evening we heard an uproar out in front of the cabin, and went to see what was going on. We found a large crowd of sea lions milling about in our bight. I started filming, and suddenly, they began leaping through the air. When we saw herring begin to jump out of the water onto the rocks, we figured out what was happening. We grabbed buckets and ran down to the beach, where we began to scoop herring up by hand.
Here’s the video. At the end of it, you can hear Michelle telling Aly to go take the cake she had been baking out of the oven so that it wouldn’t burn while we were busy with the fish.