The last time we visited Los Islotes in Baja California’s Sea of Cortez we had a great day photographing sea lions and moving through the clouds of sardines that were hugging the island. The school of fish extended about 400m around the inside of the island and were very shallow, mostly in the 10 – 25 fsw range. The sealions were not feeding that day mostly playing around and protecting their turf. It’s exhilarating to see the big bulls swimming by, barking and calling out. If they think you are too close to the harem they let you know with a few warning swim-bys, followed by barking and finally a charge (that’s the time to leave, they will bite you).

I like watching the sardine clouds slowly move away as predators and divers approach them. Below is an image were I was trying to show the ballooning of the school as a snapper moved slowly into the school. There’s a certain distance that they allow things to approach. Hope you get the idea from the photo.

The second, lower image is fairly shallow showing sardines flowing under the surface with the island in the background.

We were on the Solmar V out of Cabo San Lucas and enjoyed the experience. I have some other images from the same trip here showing some of the creatures we got to interact with. All our dives here were quite shallow so we were able to stay underwater for a long time, we logged almost 6hrs for the one day through 4 dives.

Taken with a Nikon D200, Tokina 10-17mm in an Ikelite housing with 8″ dome and DS-125 strobes.
Processed with Photoshop CS5.