"Tales from the Road"
Image by Markus Davids.
This is our second trip of the 2022 wildlife photography season. We visited Magdalena Bay Mexico for grey whales. This is an extremely special place. The wildlife here is some of the best in the world. During the early winter season we visit Mag Bay to swim with striped marlin and humpback whales. in the month of February we are here to play with friendly grey whales. Here is the photo report from this years trip… I hope you enjoy!
The glamorous life on the road. We found a place to sleep for a couple of hours at the airport, during our four hour layover.
Travel day, I am home after 24 hours of travel. We took the long way home. We left San Carlos at 6:30AM and drove the 5 1/2 hours to San Jose del Cabo airport to drop off our friends who joined us. After that we sat in the airport and waited for our red-eye flight back to Texas. We landed in Mexico City at 1am, our next flight was at 5am. We didn’t get home until 8AM the next morning.
Crappy flight schedule.
So worth it though… This has been one hell of a Baja adventure. Sadly I broke my word to myself and did not journal every night after getting back to the hotel room. The days out on the water off Mag Bay are long. Really long, and you are just beat when you get back from the sea.
The internet signal is also bad out in Mag Bay, so sharing blogs and vlogs was not an option. But the good part is I have a long-ish break in between these trips, and my next ones, so I will be sharing clips and stories from this adventure over the next few weeks.
and there will be some good ones…
Magdalena Bay did not disappoint. We had a fantastic adventure with great people - Baja and the wildlife here is first-class. This was one of the best experiences we have ever had at Mag Bay and I can’t wait to share.
The grey whales were friendlier than ever and gave us all so many unique opportunities to capture images and videos of them. We even had some great encounters with a three-week-old baby.
The baby was a bit shy, but its mom encouraged it to come in close, teaching it to swim and play around the boats. What is remarkable is this behavior only happens when the whales are in these Bays.
When the whales are out in the open ocean, they return to being shy and untrusting and do not like to be close to the boats. But in the Bay, some whales truly love interacting with people… they are such amazing animals.
And when you think about it, humans once visited these Bays to hunt the whales for their oil. As a result, we nearly brought these beautiful animals to the brink of extinction due to human greed. Sadly the Makah tribe off Washington is still trying to kill grey whales as part of their ancestral rights. Hoping that tradition comes to an end.
Anyway, I will share more blogs with you all this week, and trips, and newsletters and updates on next season's trip.
Until then, my friends, stay tuned and thank you for reading.
Mathias chumming with fresh bait… Image by Chris Kemper
Well, another tough day out on the ocean. This morning we arrived at our boat, and it was a bit chilly with some wind in the marina. Signs that it was going to be rough out on the ocean. We decided to try a different spot to see if we would get better results. The site we visited was good a week ago but went cold for us the first two days.
So we tried a seamount that was a few miles closer to land. Unfortunately, the water here was green and not the blue we had had the previous two days. But perhaps the green water would help us find those elusive sharks. Green also means the water here was colder, which might help us with the blue sharks. They tend to like the cooler waters.
As we chummed for a few hours, the winds kept building, and with it came the white caps. The swells were building, and it was getting choppy. Finally, about four-plus hours into chumming, we saw our first shark. Well, Brad thought he saw a blue shark earlier, but no one else did, so we marked it off as a phantom shark.
The shark that arrived we all saw it. It cruised in on a wave as it headed towards our hang baits. It was not a mako or a blue. It was a smooth hammerhead! Excitedly we all started gearing up. I tried to rush everyone because the one thing I know about these oceanic hammerheads is that they do not stick around very long.
Sadly I was right. The shark left as fast as it arrived. A few of us got in the water, but the shark was gone. No one saw it in the water. Damn it.
The swells were building dangerously high, so we made a safety call. We pulled all our bait, dumped the chum, and called it a day. We slowly motored back to port in a very messy ocean.
The waves were high and made for an exciting ride back home.
As we motored back to port, we encountered another smooth hammerhead along the way. It was swimming on the surface; we watched it for a quick minute, called it a few dirty names for not showing up to our chum slick, then left it alone.
Sadly today was not our day, moral is low, but thankfully we still have two more days, and tomorrow looks fantastic.
In fact, I genuinely believe tomorrow will be an excellent wildlife day at sea.
I can feel it!
Today was day one of Week Two of our Baja adventure. Yesterday I picked up the group in our rental van. Whenever I rent a vehicle for our groups, I find it important to give it a name. Last week we dubbed our van, The Grey Whale. This week our crew added some deeper thoughts into what we were going to name our ride. After a few back and forths, we dubbed our big beautiful white beast Alice.
We chose Alice as our van's name because somewhere in the 1960s, there was an albino orca out in the wild; the researchers had dubbed her Alice. Well, since orcas are one of the animals we are all hoping to encounter this week, it was a fitting name.
We began our morning in perfect conditions. It was flat calm, with no wind, and our group was excited about getting things going. We left the marina and motored into the bay. After a few miles, we spotted some birds dropping down to feed on a bait ball at the ocean's surface. There was a bunch of common dolphins and sea lions hunting the bait ball. Flashes of them would explode out of the water.
We quickly geared up and jumped in to watch the carnage that was happening just below the surface. Sadly the water visibility was horrible. We could see the bait ball and the predators attacking it, but barely. It was murky. I snapped awful images of the excitement - it was just fun getting to dive on a bait ball. We jumped in and stayed with it as long as we could. It was great when it was just us. However, two other boats showed up, and the waters quickly got crowded, so we decided to say goodbye to these beautiful babies, let the other boats have some fun, and see what else we could find.
Not long after, we ran into a pair of massive finback whales. Finbacks are the second-largest whales on the planet. It truly is a privilege to be around them. We still had not heard reports of any orca activity in the area, so we decided to spend the rest of the day checking out these big badasses.
The pair of whales we encountered were not the only whales out here. There were at least ten finback whales scattered about, and it was awesome. There is something extra special about whales. No words can honestly describe them. We spent most of our time with them until we got a radio call from a friend, letting us know that orcas were spotted about five miles away from where we were. We said bye to the whales and hauled ass in search of the sea pandas. Sadly after a couple of hours of searching, we could not find them. We decided to call it a day and began a slow ride back home to the marina.
Of course, we had to stop and snap some images of a colony of sea lions sleeping, fighting, and barking on a tiny island of rocks. Sea dogs are always a lot of fun. We thought about getting in the water but decided just to go home - maybe tomorrow.
Overall, day one was great and a great way to kick off a new week of adventures. I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for us!
