Thesiat

OH MY GOD

That is a monster (respectful) If it was a lizard it would be a dragon.

They can be bigger than the biggest grizzly bears. They are about the size of a horse, just without the stilt legs. And their faces are hiding teeth like this (sorry it's kind of gross but it shows the teeth best)

Here's a leopard seal skull next to a horse skull

they can get as big as 12 feet and can weigh like 1,200 pounds. They can swim 35 miles an hour and eat only meat - regularly eating giant penguins that weigh more than 100 pounds each, and anything else they feel like they can kill. And they're pretty smart. Only an Orca is a more dangerous hunter in arctic waters, and even they usually leave a leopard seal alone.

She's a hirsute woman with long curly hair and big dark eyes and the Wampanoag have always known exactly what she is, though the Settlers never believe it so they think she's just a succession of women, all daughters of the last one. She has a loud bark of a laugh and an unapologetic bigness to everything--her voice, her opinions, her presence. She's as I mention about seven feet in every direction, and can throw around even the biggest, strongest human man, and snap steel over her knee. She's fae, but Cold Iron does nothing to those of the sea. If you ask for relationship advice she always tells you to dump the person, and that marriage is a shackle that kills you by inches.

All selkies are related to her, she's their Grandmother. She's a species of seal that went extinct millions of years ago, that is the Last Common Ancestor of the Miroungini and Lobodontini, and she's the size of a male elephant seal but has the bauplan of a leopard seal (not the markings though).

She still shows up in seal form regularly on the beaches of Rhode Island, and has since before settlers (though she's not from there originally, she's from the sea around Ireland), and is known in modern day as Her Majesty, Madam, Milady, and other honourifics. It is HER beach. Which beach? All of them. If she's there, it is not time to be at the beach today, time to go home. Shooting her just makes her mad (and you dead). She has and continues to kill people--stupid ones. She is called by the press "a true New Englander" in that she is ornery to everyone--

Except one person. One solitary person on this Earth.

Hello 👋 I am indeed a federally licensed sailboat captain and sailing is my full time career! That said I’m so sorry to possibly disappoint you or anyone else but I do wish to clarify that I haven’t worked on a ~*big*~ tallship for a few years now. I mostly used the word ‘ship’ in my bio because (1) it sounds soooooooo much cooler than just ‘sailboat’ and (2) it was sort of a double meaning with shipping characters lol (I write fanfic). The boats I work on now are about 40 feet long.

Sailors will often joke that it just ‘gets’ you (🫵🙂‍↕️it happened to me, watch out!). I did not intend for this to become my career. I got started on mediumish 80 to 100 ton gaff rigged schooners after I graduated from college about 10 years ago. Most people have sailed at least a little 420 or optimist or something before working on a boat where mishandling a line could easily maim or even kill you, but for some reason*(load-bearing asterisk) I hopped right onto decently-sized schooners as a deckhand. I met so many awesome people and am still friends with most of them! Further, I am really fortunate to have had excellent captains and mentors over the years to help me hone my skills and become more competent, and learning to sail on larger boats has made me MUCH safer as a captain. A ‘challenging’ wind day on a 40 foot long 10 ton sailboat is just barely the average ‘normal’ forces we would experience daily on a 70+ foot 100 ton schooner so my partner and I (we take turns captaining; they’re licensed, too) have never been surprised or taken aback by forces on our boat and know what to expect.

I stopped sailing as commercial crew on larger boats in the spring of 2020 (though I have been on schooners without any passengers since then as volunteer crew) because a lot of my loved ones are severely immunocompromised and I didn’t want the potential covid exposure to 40+ passengers multiple times a day. Also, covid aside, the passenger turnover was exhausting and I didn't really get a chance to actually talk with them in depth just because there were so many people who had questions. After leaving schooner-life a previous captain phoned me up to do his varnish work and before I knew it I was recruited into working on two ~40 foot vessels that carry only six passengers (we call ‘em six packs). I LOVE them! I can actually talk to people about their interests and extensively answer any questions they have without us feeling rushed. I have met so many wonderful people from all walks of life.

*the love of my life had run off to sea and I wanted to Understand what their life was like — what were they doing daily? What were they seeing and smelling? What was sleeping aboard like? What the heck was a gollywobbler or cringle? Long story short: oops! Now we own two sailboats together.

Brevity has never been a skill of mine so the rest of your questions are below the cut:

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A leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) emerges from the kelp on Bird Island, South Georgia