silkiesightings

Cape Cod 1963

Is it a silkie that the following article by D.R.McBride is describing?

End of July I arranged to go out in the boat with Stan Leamus. Stan is a regular old New Englander composed of harshly angled bone and leathery brown skin; his only concession to that day's airless heat was to remove his knitted sweater, and it lay in the cluttered little cabin among nets and pots and oily rope. As the boat chugged out into Cape Cod Bay:
'We'll catch nothing in this glare,' he said.
The sea was like a sheltered pond through which, at long intervals, passed a heaving swell so slow as to slide unnoticed beneath the hull.
I saw it first and called out to Stan.
'What's that?' I cried, and pointed.
'Looks like a seal.'
We watched the sleek dark head on the surface. I put up my binoculars to compare the little one with the grey seal of Scottish waters. But what I saw made me pause. Then:
'Take a turn over there, Stan.’ I said. ‘There's blood on the surface.'
As we drew closer I jumped up onto the cabin roof for a clearer view down into the water. There I could see the sluggish movement of limbs.
'It's not a seal, it's a man!'
Stan eased back on his throttle and guided the boat round on a wide curve about the dark stain spreading in the water, and I dived straight in from the roof. Between us we lifted the thickset figure from the water and we lay him on the decking. A deep, jagged wound had slit his inner thigh. I found the pressure point and twisted a piece of twine into a tight tourniquet then pressed a pad over the wound, trying to draw the gaping sides together as I did so. I was aware throughout of Stan standing above me watching with disapproval.
'If you listen to me you'll leave that. Throw him back over the side.' And Stan turned his head and spat.
'What do you mean?'
'Take a look at that, and use your head.'
For the first time I studied the injured man, and I’ll say I was surprised. I’m a hairy man myself, but that figure lying in the well deck there was covered in a brindled brown hair over his shoulders, his arms and the backs of his hands, across his chest, his back and buttocks. The outer parts of his legs were also thickly covered, wet, sleek and streamlined.
'Is it a man after all?' I couldn’t help myself – I simply didn’t know what to think.
'Use your head,' Stan grunted again. 'Where did it come from?'
Then we both looked out over the tilting surface. There was no horizon, the sea shifted to haze and the haze became the sky. There were no boats.
'Tell me what you're thinking, Stan,’ I said, ‘I don't understand this.'
'I think we would have been better never to have seen him.'
'But what is he?'
Stan waited awhile before he spoke again, then:
'I don't give any credence to the idea that they search for the souls of doomed sailors, but they're said to swim in the wrecks. I've never seen one before, and I wish we'd never seen this.' Savagely he opened up the throttle, and I knew he was heading us back to land.
I said nothing. I've sailed with fishermen before and I know their superstitions.
'It's one of the seal folk,' I told him finally. 'We know them in Scotland, where I'm from. Every man of the western isles is acquainted with them. He'll do us no harm. Do you have a needle on board? I have to stitch him up.'
In the first-aid box I found what was needed. Already I knew that I could never call a doctor. I knew from that moment that it was a silkie I had saved.