today i am a man

I've always said it takes a man to catch a man. And by "man" I meant an adult male sea lion, of course. My previous attempts at netting adult males have varied - some spectacular, some pathetic - but all ultimately failed. Today, I have broken my losing streak and proven to myself that I am man enough to catch myself a big boy.

Okay, so Tapia isn't the biggest big boy I've ever seen. He's barely getting his sagittal crest, so he's not much more than five years old. And he probly doesn't weigh much more than 100 kilos (he was too big for our scale, so I can't say for sure), which means he's not much bigger than our average adult female. But still, he has balls (as you can see in this picture) and I took him down.

Now I must admit, I had a lot of help from my crew (three guys, three girls, all new to the sea lion scene). And Tapia himself assisted, by being lethargic and approachable. But he put on quite a show once we had him in the net. It's frightening, boarding back 200 pounds of pissed off muscle. I know, cuz I've done that much before. And I dare say, my girls did way less squealing than I would have. They did suggest perhaps we should let him go, that maybe he was feeling quite healthy after all, but I'd already seen the tell tale signs of domoic acid poisoning - back scratching, butt biting, and, as you can see in his mug shot, the lovely brown slobber. So we kept him.

True to form, I did have one complication. I was unable to free him from the net once I had him safely in the cage. Luckily, we were less than one mile from our triage center so we decided to secure the pole of the net just well enough to make the drive to our facility. It proved interesting, trying to free him from both the cage and the net inside his cramped pen, but that's all part of the fun, right?

The reason I had to catch Tapia myself was that I had already called in a favor from my rescue mentor turned calvary (the same gal who helped me clean up my dock rescue mess earlier this week). I'd asked her to join me on a rescue of a much more pathetic, abscess riddled sea lion pup who'd been sitting on a rock surrounded by ocean. His wounds were so obvious and painful, I just couldn't afford to miss so I begged my ringer to do my dirty work. She, of course, made his rescue look easy. The hardest parts were finding him (my first scout failed to see him and nearly sent me home) and getting him up the steep trail.

I'm happy to report that Popet is now pleasantly zonked out (on butorphanol and lorazepam), though I'm not entirely convinced he'll be alive in the morning. I would share pictures, but seriously, they're gruesome. My alarm is set to wake me obscenely early so I can give him more butorphanol at dawn. So I'm off, then, to sleep. My first night as a man.