By Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
INWOOD — The gray spotted seal that came ashore at a small Inwood beach at the western end of Dyckman Street has gone back out to sea.
It was a short visit, but the round-eyed seal made a big impact on some uptown residents who flocked to the Hudson River Thursday to try to catch a glimpse of her cheerful flippers and blubbery body.
"I rode up here from Harlem just to see it," Sarah Wurl, 26, said of the female seal that spent about 24 hours ashore before slipping back into the water Thursday night. "You don’t get to see this kind of thing in the city."
The seal spent most of the day Thursday basking in the sun after being given a clean bill of health by experts, and by 6 p.m. the mammal had reentered the water and slipped away.
"We hope she comes back," said Carolina Meyer, 33, who walked to the shoreline with her eight-year-old daughter, Marisol.
In the meantime, the hunt is on for the perfect name for the Inwood seal.
DNAinfo asked uptown residents on Twitter and Facebook what they thought the best name for the seal might be after learning the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation had not yet named the slick-skinned animal.
Suggestions included Aguacate (the Spanish word for avocado), Mangú (a Dominican dish of mashed plantains), Martha (perhaps for her closeness to the George Washington Bridge) and Navy Seal, in reference to the Navy SEAL Team 6 that took down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan earlier this week.
Top contenders are the literary Isham-ael for Melville's "Moby Dick" and Hudson, for the river from which she emerged to Inwood’s shore.
For now, residents will have to figure out which name the seal would like best on their own as her Twitter feed, @UptownSeal, went quiet late Thursday night.
Until the seal returns to give her vote on a new name, DNAinfo will pass along all the name suggestions left in the comments section below.
