Boat owner surprised to find baby sea lion snoring and sneezing on the bunk next to him

A San Diego boat owner got the surprise of a lifetime when he woke up early on Sunday to find a baby sea lion sleeping on the bunk next to him. “I woke up at 2:30 in the morning to the sounds of snoring and sneezing that were not my own, and I looked around the boat and I didn’t see anything, and it went away,” Michael Duffy said.



Duffy thought maybe a friend crashed on the boat, which is docked at the Yacht Club. He went back to sleep. At 6am, another sneeze and more snoring. He got up to look. “And right there curled up, just like a dog, on one of my bunks was a tiny little baby sea lion,” Duffy said. They were sleeping just feet away for more than four hours.

“I was shocked, this isn’t anything that happens, I used to have a dog, and he looked like a little dog just curled up on the bench, the bunk there.” Duffy said the sea lion woke up and saw him standing there. “His reaction was very indifferent, it was like, let me go back to sleep. I’m happy and he wasn’t shocked, he wasn’t surprised,” Duffy said. “I just kind of started shoo-ing him out of the boat and he followed my directions like it was a dog,” Duffy said.


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“And then every once in a while he’s look back and he didn’t look like he wanted to leave,” Duffy said. “He’s got a tag on him, he looks relatively healthy. I just kind of move him out here. It’s the best for me not to play with a wild animal,” Duffy said. It is believed that the sea lion was one of the sea lion pups Sea World rescued. It had an orange tag on the flipper, which is how Sea World tracks the marine mammals they take in.

With additional news video.