When you open your door in the morning to go to work, what's the most likely thing you're going to see? Your street, your neighbors, maybe a paper or flyers on your doorstep.

These people found something quite different waiting for them outside their door. No, it wasn't a stray cat or dog looking for scraps of food.

Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was notified in the early morning on April 25 that an unexpected visitor had showed up at the Royal Esplanade Apartments in Redcar. When they investigated, they found a baby seal pup at the doorstep of one of the apartments.

It's not known how the seal made it all the way from the ocean, across the streets, and up a flight of stairs, but rescuers suspected he was seeking shelter from the previous night's storm.

The confused but adorable seal sparked a rescue effort to bring him back to his home in the sea.

"While we were assembling to carry out a lifeboat changeover this morning, one of our crew was alerted to a seal sheltering in the doorway of the Royal Apartments on the sea front," Redcar RNLI wrote on Facebook.

When they arrived on the scene, they had no crate to transport the seal. Luckily, one of the off duty coastguards owned a pet shop and showed up with just the thing.

"Having alerted the rescue service we were working out how to get the pup back to the water when an off-duty coastguard officer who runs a local pet shop drove past in a van. And in the van was a dog cage," RNLI wrote on Facebook.

After the team encouraged the little guy into a dog cage, they brought him to the shore, where he eagerly took off towards the lapping waves.

"A bit of cautious coaxing got the seal into the cage and it was soon reunited with the North Sea," said a RNLI spokesperson.

Watch the video of the adventurous baby seal returning to the ocean:

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