A Dive to Remember: encountering seals

SCUBA presents the first set of entries from our 2025 writing competition, A Dive to Remember. Paul Friday tells of a shallow but memorable seal encounter in the Farne Islands.

Briefing:

It has to be The Farne Islands. I know it’s not deep, dark or daring, but it is the most delightful diving when the seals are in town.

The dive:

We usually lie in the kelp at around six metres and let the seals come to us - the young ones are curious and want to play and the older ones are often sleeping in the clefts. There’s no point chasing after the youngsters: they are Formula One to our bicycles. The advantage is totally theirs.

But if you wait, and particularly if you have something bright or shiny, they come to you. And if you do move about in the kelp, they sneak up on you. This usually means you find yourself towing one – you find yourself struggling to make progress, look round and there’s a seal holding your fin in its mouth and getting a free ride.

Paul Friday in warmer waters

On this dive we went for a swim along the side of one of the islets. It’s all very well keeping still in the kelp, but it can get cold. We suffered a couple of sneaky tows before we stopped by some rocks with a small group of seals and I swapped to my video camera. It’s just a plain action camera, but it has a video light, and one of the seals took a great liking to the shiny bright thing. After a couple of close looks it tried to taste it. What then ensued was three minutes of me holding back a very determined young seal that really wanted the shiny thing.

I kept the camera running, not because I’m a budding wildlife cameraman but because I was trying to prevent the seal from eating the camera with my free hand. At one point you can hear its teeth scrape the housing. I must stress that this was all playful – the seal was mouthing at me, just as a puppy would. I could see its teeth and claws, and if it really wanted to bite me it would do more than hold my hand in its mouth. Even so, one tooth popped the stitching in the Kevlar palm of my glove.

But anyway, after watching me with great amusement it was finally my buddy’s turn. My seal got bored and went off to chew on someone else’s fins, at which point a second seal wrapped a flipper around my second buddy’s leg. It was my turn to laugh and film my friends turning round to find a seal that had already gone back behind them.

Even when they all departed and we were surface-swimming back to the boat, seal heads were popping up around us and some of the finning became suspiciously hard work.

Debrief:

This is magical diving – sea creatures that are masters of their environment, yet choose to interact with us and want to play.

This article was originally published in SCUBA magazine, Issue 156, June 2025. For more membership benefits, visit bsac.com/benefits.

Images in this online version may have been substituted from the original images in SCUBA magazine due to usage rights.