This shot of a young seal lounging alone early Sunday morning at Beverly’s Independence Park, after the tide went out, immediately reminded onlookers of Shoebert the seal, and his lengthy visit to Beverly in September 2022. At the time, Shoebert had apparently swam into the Shoe Pond — named for the United Shoe Machine factory that it had served — next to the Cummings Center via a 250-yard-long cement tunnel connecting the pond to the Bass River. After nine days of eating fish and evading capture, he flippered across an adjacent parking lot and turned himself in at the police station. He was crated the next day and driven to the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut where he was given a checkup, declared healthy and, after a few days’ rest, released back into the ocean in Rhode Island, with a ‘satellite tag’ attached to track his movements. There have since been reports of sightings, but Shoebert is not known to ever have returned to Shoe Pond or Beverly.
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