Speaking to local media, one of the fishermen explained that after getting on the boat with them, all attempts to get the animal to leave proved futile; the seal only disembarked when they decided to come back to shore for the day.
"A buddy and me go out to sea on our boat," a fisherman named Andrei told Sakhalin's ASTV.ru. "We hear something shouting. We look out, and see that a fur seal has come up beside us. Then he up and climbs into our boat. We let him ride around with us for a bit, and then decide that we should try to drive him away. He climbs off, and we figure that we've driven him away, but then he climbs on again, and this repeats several times over."
Andrei noted that the seal eventually became so determined to stay on the boat that he began growling whenever the fishermen would try to kick him off. "And so it turned out that he rode along with us until we came back to shore, about eight hours later," he explained.
What the fishermen found most surprising was that the seal decided to stay on the boat with them, even though they had not a morsel of food with them. They had gone out to sea only to set up their fishing gear.
"This was the first time that anything like this has happened to us, although we go out to sea often," Andrei explained. "Usually if we see marine animals, they just swim past the boat and that's it. But this time we got a curious and sociable one."
After returning to shore, the fishermen parted ways with the seal for the last time, sending him back to sea.
