Baja Wildlife Trip Report 2026
- Week 2 -
La Ventana, Mexico
May 9 - 16, 2026
May 10, 2026. Day One.
A new week begins. New group. New search.
We headed out this morning into a beautiful bay. No clouds, low wind, calm seas.
Exactly the kind of conditions that make you want to push far offshore and see what the ocean might give you.
Our day begins.
Not long after leaving port we ran into a pod of bottlenose dolphins feeding inside the bay. We stopped briefly to watch them before continuing on.
With conditions this nice, we needed to take advantage of it and get as far out as we dared.
Later in the morning we encountered three humpback whales.
A mother, calf, and escort.
Brad sent up the drone hoping to capture some nice aerial footage of the trio moving through the calm sea.
The ocean was unbelievably flat today.
Eventually we moved toward another area where several boats were swimming with mobula rays.
The groups of mobulas were small, and with several boats already trying to work them, we decided to leave the area and continue searching.
Toward the end of the day we received reports of orcas.
That changed things quickly.
We headed over to investigate and eventually found a lone male orca near Orca Landie. The locals orca hotspot.
The orca surfaced near the boat in slightly lumpy seas, passed by us once… and then ghosted us.
Just as quickly as he appeared, he disappeared.
We eventually relocated him again while heading back toward home, but once again he vanished almost immediately after surfacing.
This guy clearly didn’t have much interest in us today.
So we decided to leave him alone and call it a day.
Still…
we saw an orca.
And life is always good on the days you see orcas.
May 11, 2026. Day Two.
We headed out this morning into beautiful conditions and onto a different boat from yesterday.
Already there were large groups of mobula rays moving through the bay. Always a good sign of how much life is around right now.
There were too many boats so we left the mobulas behind and headed north in search of the orcas, hoping they were still somewhere in the area.
After searching through the morning, we eventually decided to stop at La Reina for a swim with the sea lions.
And man… I am so glad we did.
The place was alive.
The visibility was incredible, and huge schools of tiny juvenile fish covered parts of the reef.
Everything was feeding on them.
Skipjack tuna were darting in and out of the schools, slashing through them at full speed.
The sea lions were super interactive.
It was chaos in the best possible way.
I spent some time searching for diving cormorants, hoping to photograph one underwater, but never managed to spot one beneath the surface.
Eventually I switched gears and started searching the reef for octopus.
I found one moving across the rocks.
A few moments later, a second octopus appeared and slowly crawled over toward the first one I had been following.
The second octopus stretched out one of its tentacles, almost like it was reaching over to investigate or touch the other.
The octopus I was photographing immediately balled up one of its arms in like a fist and punched the other octopus.
Man, I started laughing.
I love these guys.
I spent a little more time photographing the two of them before finally climbing back onto the boat.
What a dive.
Absolutely incredible.