Good discussion guys + I am gonna elaborate on what I mentioned in the initial posts about the time I heard one. Here's what went down + I'll stake my rep at the org on it as the gospel truth, to the very best of my memory.

Years ago I was out Harrison Lake which is a pretty massive lake about 60 km long + it's connected to the sea by a slow moving river + seals come up the river all the time.

I was on the south-eastern part of the lake, very wild coast line. I'm not sure what time of year it was, but it was got dark fairly earily. I have been kayaking for 20 years and I often stay out after dark.

At dusk the water fowl were going nuts way across the lake making a racket, ducks or Canada geese I guess, but they often do that in the evening. The sound was carrying across the water about 6 km to my location and I was kinda wishing they'd shut up. There were no houses for about 5 kilometers in any direction, and at this time of year even those houses would be uninhabited.

I was really close to shore maybe about 20 feet, and I was whiping in and out of the little bays that dot the coast. All of a sudden I smelled something very bad; a few years before I had encountered a bloated-dead seal floating in the water and it stunk in a simmilar way; so I got tunnel vision and thought "there's a dead seal in the water" I was sort of floating there in the bay focusing on the water to see where the dead seal was, I could smell it, but I couldn't see it... After about 30 seconds of not finding it I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on.

About 8-10 minutes later I was paddling along, with the ducks across the way still making a racket and that's when I heard it. Instantly I was like "Wow, what the hell was that!???" I pulled my paddle out of the water because unfortunately just as I heard what I'd heard I was on the backstroke "splash" of the paddle so I didn't hear it that well.

At this point I was drifting silently listening as carefully as I could, and I noticed that EVERYTHING on the lake was suddenly silent also.

Then after about 15 seconds I heard it again, plain as could be this time, and the call came from about 700 meters behind me right from the bay that I had thought I smelled the seal. It was a wierd "buzzing" kind of a call, but the thing is it had this presence to it. Like "I'm the King of the Jungle" kinda presence... It's like you might imagine that it might be like on an Africian Savanna when a Lion suddenly calls out and everything goes silent, even the crickets...

Very amazing + I have a feeling that it was in the woods in that bay when I stopped there, but I was so sure I'd see a bloated-dead seal that I didn't realize that the smell was coming from the woods and not the water. It might even have been watching me from the woods, but I just wasn't looking in the right place to see it.