Sea Lion Surfaces Far From Sea

California Highway Patrol officers cruising the dusty inland farm roads of the San Joaquin Valley deal with a lot -- speeders, drunk drivers, fleeing felons. On Monday morning, they dealt with a 350-pound sea lion.

“He was just sitting there on the shoulder of the road,� said Officer Mike Panelli. “He must have been 100 miles from the ocean. The Fish and Game guys said he probably came up the rivers and canals. They say he probably got there on his own.�

Panelli said while CHP officers waited near Los Banos for marine biologists to show up and take care of the quarrelsome mammal, it clambered up onto the trunk of one of their patrol cars for a nap.

“He just sat there, sunning himself,� Panelli said. “If any officers got too close, he sort of growled at them.�

Eventually, experts from the state Department of Fish and Game and the Marine Mammal Rescue Center at Moss Landing, Calif., arrived to pick up the sea lion and haul it away.

“He’s pretty big,� said Kathy Zagzebski, a project manager with the center. “We had 10 volunteers and a truck. It was a lot of work.�

Zagzebski said the sea lion, an adolescent male about 3 to 5 years old, appeared to be uninjured and in good health. She said that after a thorough checkup at the center, the animal probably would be returned to the ocean, possibly as early as today.

Large marine mammals such as sea lions occasionally head up rivers from the sea, following the schools of fish on which they thrive, Zagzebski said.

“Often, they’re the only predator around, and that makes life pretty happy for them,� she said.

The sea lion was spotted Saturday in the San Joaquin River near Gustine, and again Sunday, farther upstream, said Greg Gerstenberg, a Fish and Game spokesman.

Zagzebski said the animal apparently continued upstream, using sloughs and irrigation canals, until it ran out of water, then kept going at least another half mile across farmland.

Another, perhaps more sinister version of events, could be that the sea lion was dumped on the road. Either way, it was quite a sight.

“We got a call about 7 o’clock this morning from a local farmer,� said Panelli, who is based at the CHP’s office in Los Banos. “He said he’d seen a sea lion in the middle of Henry Miller Road.�

It took a couple of hours for the marine biologists to arrive. They brought along nets to snare the animal, a cage in which to house it and large shields to protect them against its occasional outbursts of temper.

“We see a lot of things up here,� Panelli said. “But we’ve never seen anything like this.�