A 10-minute rib ride over waves gleaming like crumpled tinfoil has brought us to the lee of a small green island, where sea people are waiting. Fifteen bob in open water, a dozen more float head up in a patch of kelp. “That lot are sleeping,” says our skipper and guide, Lewis Johnson. “Leave them be – they won’t be aggressive but there’s no need to startle them. You’ll see others snoozing on the bottom.”
We kit up, drop over the side and swim through a noodle-soup of seaweeds: mustard-coloured strands of thongweed stroke my cheeks and chin, the only skin exposed to the chilly Atlantic. Weeds of other colours – crimson, bronze, gold and bright green – shelter fleets of tiny fish, larger yellow wrasses and compass jellyfish, harmless enough and enigmatically beautiful.
Emerging into open water, we see conspicuous dark tubers with pointed ends resting on pale sand below us – snoozing seals. Others glide past so swiftly and smoothly that they seem to materialise from nowhere. Among the weedy rocks more sleepers are camouflaged perfectly until they move, and I notice one just six feet below me when the crescent-moon whites of its eyes roll in unison to follow me.
I’m floating with Lochy, my son, when a small, pale individual swoops below, rolling on to its back to watch us, then rises behind me and investigates my left fin, first with whiskers, then muzzle, and finally rubs its whole cheek hard on the trailing edge, squinting blissfully.
Grey seals off the coast of south-west Britain use places like this as service stations. They aren’t generally resident, so their reactions aren’t born of familiarity. They are simply curious, especially the youngsters, though they vary in confidence, as we do. Lochy, at 12, is the youngest of our human group, and it seems the juvenile seals are particularly interested in him. Perhaps it’s his size; perhaps they intuit youthful playfulness, but he’s also wearing a full-face snorkel mask instead of a mask and mouth-snorkel combo. His face is fully visible and he can speak underwater. Perhaps that’s what they like. After all, these are intelligent, sociable animals. If not exactly a meeting of minds, each interaction feels like an encounter of mutual choice.
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
