Bizarrely, the Australian fur seals look like Irish setters puppies astride torpedoes as they rocket up from the blue depths to gaze momentarily at divers snorkling happily in a calm sea.
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Shortly before swimming with the seals, some of us had been reeling in the night's meal on a local charter boat over one of the nearby reefs. Snapper, flathead and a few unwelcome red morwongs keep jumping onto the hooks despite urgings from the fishers to go away because "you taste terrible".
Welcome to Westlife.
Paul West is living the life. He quit the rat race and is living off the land (and sea) on a beautiful former diary farm amid the green rolling hills of the NSW south coast.
The property is at Central Tilba near Tilba Tilba on the NSW south coast. Once a gold mining mecca and dairying centre known to earlier generations for being the new home of Zara Holt when she married a local farmer after her husband, the prime minister Harold Holt, disappeared in the Victorian surf, it has in recent times evolved into a New Age weekender watering hole. The setting is straight out of Central Casting. Out front, the Tasman Sea disappears into the sparkling blue, behind Mount Gulaga and the Great Dividing Range looms dark and quiet.
West has chooks, pigs, cattle, bees, vegie patches and a picturesque grey, weatherboard farmhouse that doubles as a kitchen cooking set when he does his chef thing.
The farm is River Cottage, and West is about to film the third series of the Australian spin-off of the hugely popular seachange cum cooking franchise set up in Britain by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
The Englishman, a celebrity chef, journalist and food writer who previously had the foresight to read philosophy and psychology at Oxford, turned the 1970s British sitcom The Good Life into reality TV in 1999 when Channel 4 followed his attempt at sustainability and self-sufficiency on a small and pretty land-holding in Dorset in the series Escape to River Cottage.
River Cottage not only racked up more seasons than the amusing Richard Briers/Felicity Kendal comedy but was transported to Australia.
West is way different in style than Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Apart from watching his beard startlingly erupt into a major hipster-statement during the series he has developed and grown along with the show since it debuted in Australia in June 2013.
West started out pretty rough-hewn. Being welcomed at Tilba Tilba by Fearnley-Whittingstall in the first program probably didn't help even though it showed the master bestowing his patronage on his Australian apprentice.
But somehow, West's natural boyish charm overcame the awkwardness and he has become a delight to watch as crops failed and he contemplated hens that would not lay or the personal quandary of killing pigs he had raised from piglets.
And the presence of his girlfriend Alicia and Digger the border collie-cross helped too. Maybe the dog helped a lot.
"You come, you plant and then you reap what you sow," the amiable 31-year-old says. "And I've got to say, I did a lot of learning and still got heaps more to learn."
West started his career in Newcastle's Darby Street, worked for a number of years at Melbourne's chic Vue de Monde before moving to Tasmania to study permaculture design and work as a chef in Hobart. Alicia's cousin told him they were auditioning to cast River Cottage Australia; suddenly he was the man.
West says the third series will be more about consolidation. It has moved from being a kind of hobby farm to trying to make it pay its way. A number of local farmers who are into sustainability and self-sufficiency are helping out.
"The economic side of it can be very difficult but I know plenty of people who are doing it and direct marketing of your products is the only way you can make it work – selling directly to the people who eat the food you produce," West says. "The show is really about trying to educate and empower people to make strong decisions in relation to the food they buy and the meals they prepare."
The NSW south coast community certainly appears to relish having River Cottage in their midst. Real estate agents are selling nearby properties as "the home of River Cottage Australia".
And West seems to have been bitten by the bug. "We've bought a house nearby and that's where we've settled. We're here for good," he says.
Fast forward a year, with the series now complete and ready to air and that decision has, if anything, become more concrete.
West and Alicia now have a young son ("When he was born they wrote it up on the blackboard at the general store, so he's in. He's more Tilba than I'll ever be," West says), there's a River Cottage cooking school about to open and his focus is to show through the series what he's discovered for himself, that a community is what makes a project like his work.
"People are gregarious community-minded creatures and whether we like it or not we flourish in community groups," he says. "We can't just put up walls and live in insulated units, we need to be part of something bigger. It keeps us grounded and inspires us and keeps us going.
"And for me to help instigate that conversation? I never in a million years thought I'd be in a position to help do that. I'm so humbled by what's happened."
River Cottage Australia, LifeStyle Food, Tuesday, 8.30pm.