Off the elbow of Cape Cod, on sandbars that appear and vanish with the tide, lies one of the largest concentrations of seals on the eastern seaboard of the United States. On a good low water at Monomoy you can be looking at several thousand animals hauled out on a single bar, with the noise carrying across the water before you see them. Sixty years ago there were almost none.
That is the point of this page. Massachusetts paid a bounty on seals until 1962, on the reasoning that they competed with fishermen, and the species was shot down to near-nothing along this coast. The Marine Mammal Protection Act stopped the killing in 1972. A survey of the entire Maine coast the following year turned up something like thirty grey seals. The colony on Muskeget, out past Nantucket, produced five pups in 1988 and more than two thousand by 2008. Southeastern Massachusetts now holds them in the tens of thousands. Whatever else it is, this is one of the clearest wildlife recoveries in the country, and it happened in the memory of people still fishing out of Chatham.
The practical geography is straightforward. Chatham sits where the Cape turns, with Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge running south from it: two long barrier islands and a scatter of bars, established as a refuge in 1944 and covering roughly 7,604 acres, most of it designated wilderness. The Fish and Wildlife Service runs no public boat service there, so visitors go out with local operators holding refuge permits, in shallow-draft boats that can work water a larger hull cannot. Trips generally run an hour and a half to a couple of hours, and the tide decides everything: the bars are only there to haul out on when the water has left them.
Two species share the ground and they are easy to tell apart once somebody has shown you. Grey seals are the big ones with the long Roman-nosed profile, resident here year-round and breeding on these bars in winter. Harbour seals are smaller, rounder-faced and more dog-like, and they are mostly a cold-season presence, arriving in autumn and thinning out in late spring when they head north to pup. A trip in November sees both. A trip in July sees greys.
And there is the part nobody should have to discover at a beach. Seals are what brought white sharks back within sight of the Outer Cape shore. A seal trip is not a shark trip and no responsible operator sells it as one, but you are out on the water at the edge of a predator's grocery shop, and occasionally that shows.
