Magdalena Bay Sardine Run(Don’t call it a dive trip!) A couple of years ago, a group of friends went to Magdalena Bay, and despite getting caught up in a tropical cyclone and a pretty leaky boat on its maiden voyage, they raved about the trip. Their excitement over the experience plus photos and videos of Marlin, Sea Lions, and Whales put this trip on the Must-Do list. About Magdalena Bay Magdalena Bay is on the Pacific side of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, about 200 miles and a 15-hour cruise up the coat from Cabo San Lucas. While the destination is Magdalena Bay, all the action takes place in the open Pacific Ocean outside of the bay. The terrain here is very dry and desert-like with not a lot on the shore except for colonies with thousands of sea lions. This adventure is based around the sardine run that occurs outside Magdalena Bay between October to January. The portable feast of sardine attracts the likes of Striped Marlin, Sailfish, sea lions, dolphins, and several type of whales. The sardines tend to group together in bait balls ranging in size from a few hundred fish to countless thousands. The fish cluster together in these bait balls as small as a beach ball or as big as a school bus. The bait balls can be located by observing birds circling, diving, and swimming on the surface wherever they find the sardines. Eagle eyed panga drivers spot the bait balls and zoom over to where the action is happening. Once on site to an active bait ball, the panga discharges its load of camera and go-pro wielding snorkelers. SnorkelingYes, I said Snorkel! This is not a dive trip. Due to the highly dynamic and random nature of the bait balls, this is not a diving adventure. All the action takes place at the surface in deep blue ocean water. The bait balls might be in motion or static. This means that when you jump in on the bait ball, you might be with it for just seconds, or half an hour or more. It all depends on a degree of luck in finding a static bait ball, or how much stamina you have to follow a moving dynamic bait ball. Since it is not a dive focused adventure, this trip can be a fantastic way to share some ocean adventure with friends and family who have not seen the light and become scuba divers. They will get close to some amazing sea creatures and hopefully get a taste of what we love about the ocean. That said, snorkeling like this is a very energetic activity. You need to be a good swimmer and comfortable with the water. There is no bottom and no reef to look at. Just thousands of feet of deep blue water and sword tipped Marlin fish zooming toward you at 30 miles per hour. You will be doing a lot of kicking, snorkel clearing, and ladder climbing back into the boat, maybe a couple of dozen times a day. Getting to Magdalena BayWe have been booking Liveaboard diving trips with Nautilus Adventures for almost 25 years, so they were our preferred and only operator we considered for this excursion. The trip was hosted on their vessel “The Gallant Lady”, a 112-foot ship with accommodations for 12 passengers in 6 staterooms. It’s a nice boat and well maintained. The rooms were very comfortable and relatively large as liveaboard rooms go. The logistics of the trip are pretty simple. Fly to Cabo San Lucas, non-stop from SEA to SJD. Book a hotel for at least one night in Cabo before boarding the boat in the morning. Meet at the dive shop in Cabo with your bags, and they do all the rest of the heavy lifting. They can provide a van to the airport once you disembark. Fly home. Easy. DAN to the Rescue Or maybe not so easy. Fortunately, there were no accidents or injuries during the trip. However, my wife had a back injury a few months prior to the trip. Despite best efforts to heal up, get treatments, and physical therapy, she was not going to be in good enough condition to make this trip. The sometimes bouncing, jarring panga rides alone would have been disqualifying and a week of finning and kicking vigorously while snorkeling would not have been comfortable at all. Have I mentioned that snorkeling is a lot more physically difficult than diving? It is, by a lot. Fortunately, we have the DAN Enhanced membership plan. DAN Enhanced includes as a standard feature Medical Cancelation coverage of up to $10,000 dollars per person, per year. Once my wife decided that she was not going to be able to join the trip, we downloaded the required form from DAN and brought it to her doctor to fill out and sign off. With that signature, and the receipts and documentation about the trip, we made a claim to DAN for the full value of her share of the trip. Within a couple of week DAN had approved the claim and issued a check for the full amount. Her flights with Alaska Airlines were fully credited back to our account for use on future flights. I was not initially inclined to go on the trip without her. Signing up for the Mag Bay trip had really been her initiative and desire more than mine. Snorkeling, not diving? Buy she insisted that I go on the trip as planned and bring back some great photos to share. I am glad I did! And I am glad to have DAN Enhanced. We have used the medical cancelation covered that DAN provides 3 or 4 times now over 25 years. We’ve received at least $20,000 in coverage over that time for canceled trips. There was the bad back, a sinus surgery, a broken leg. You get the idea. If you are using the basic DAN plan, I strongly recommend moving up to the Enhanced tier of coverage. It is more than worth the minimal extra price. Daily Routine in Magdalena Bay After an overnight run up to Magdalena Bay, a 15-hour journey, we arrived at our destination by Noon. The trip north was not too rough but did result in one befouled trash can before my sea-sickness patch kicked in. Once in Mag Bay, the sea was calm, and I don’t think anyone on board got sick. There were 5 days of snorkel-bait-ball action in Mag Bay. We split the 11 or 12 guests across two panga boats. The boats were pretty good sized with lots of room for 6 or 7 snorkelers, a guide, and the driver. Water, drinks, snacks, and lunch were stocked on board the panga for the day. After a good breakfast, we headed out to look for bait balls, usually including a pass by the shore side sea lion colonies. There were literally thousands of sealions on the rocks and beaches. You could often smell and hear them before you can see them! Our very first sighting on the first morning outside the bay was a mother and calf pair of Humpback Whales! The first photo I took in the water was of the Humpbacks up close. This was my first time in 35 years of diving seeing an actual whale under water! A real thrill. Of course, that first photo was garbage as I didn’t have things dialed in yet and was a little over excited about the surprise experience. Fortunately, I would have several more opportunities to take photos of Humpbacks on the trip. We splashed three times on this first pair of Humpbacks, boarding and repositioning the panga in the path of the whales and jumping back in as they approached. The US and Canada have rules about get too close to whales or operating motorboats in their vicinity, but apparently Mexico, or at least Magdalena Bay, has no such rule! But not to worry, the panga drivers are all experienced pros, and the boats are not big enough to do much damage to a whale. After chasing down bait balls all day, and hanging out with more sea lions, marlin, sailfish, dolphin and whales than I can count, we would head back before sunset to clean up and get ready for dinner. These were very full days! The second panga, full of a group of German folks traveling together, voted for a more relaxed schedule. They slept in, had breakfast and went out for about 3 hours in the morning, returning to the boat for lunch and a nap. Then they went out for a couple more hours before dinner. Honestly, they probably saw as much great stuff as my more active panga. But the more time in the water the more opportunities you get for amazing encounters. What to wearSince you will be spending a lot of time on the water in an open boat, you need to make sure you are dressed for the conditions. The Panga boats are covered with a roof to provide shade and some protection from any rain, but it is an open boat. There can be wind and air movement when motoring quickly from place to place. Since you are pretty much always going to be wet between splashes, you can get cold even on a warm day. Plan to bring: 3mm or 5mm wetsuit – I wore a 3mm suit Hooded vest like a Lavacore or Sharkskin as a layer you can add when you get cold A hat with a drawstring that won’t blow away A wind breaker jacket or Surf-Fur style over coat you can pull over your wetsuit A neck gaiter you can put around your neck and pull up over your face for sun protection Sunscreen to re-apply as needed (there are no reefs to worry about here) Fast Fins – Many people used free diving style fins for better speed in the water Lycra socks under your fins to prevent friction blisters A really good quality snorkel. Test it before you go on the trip! I brought two and one was leaky. Photography in Magdalena BayBring a camera! This was an amazing trip with hundreds of big animal encounters every day. However, you are snorkeling and need to be able to maneuver and handle your camera while swimming vigorously after a bait ball fleeing from marlin. That means no light or strobes. No arms to create drag in the water. And definitely have a lanyard clipped to your body because there is no bottom! I brough my Nauticam housing with a small 140mm dome port and 15mm fisheye lens. I really wanted close-up photos of whales, and the fisheye was the right tool for the job. The marlin, sealions, and sailfish need to come in very close for good photos with a fisheye lens, but that did happen a lot and I was happy with the natural light photos after some white balance corrections. That said, you might want to have a wide-angle zoom lens available to get a bit more reach than a fisheye lens can offer. However, I don’t recommend a “wet lens” like the Nauticam WWL ports. Since you are jumping in and out of the water frequently and staying near the surface you will likely have issues with air bubbles under a wet lens. There is not enough time or pressure that would normally clear the bubbles. And you often may want to shoot the instant you hit the water. I shot with a Nikon Z8 and Nikon 8-15mm fisheye lens under a 140mm dome port. My typical camera settings were: 1/200s shutter speed – Freeze fast action and balance bright ambient water conditions F9-11 aperture – You will want a wide depth of field so any wider aperture would lose clarity ISO 500 – A good mix of detail and balances the mid-range aperture setting Shoot RAW and Auto WB - Plan on adjusting white balance in post. There will be a cyan cast in most of your pictures even at near zero depth with lots of natural light. Things move too fast and conditions change frequently to bother with measuring or setting White Balance in the camera. I think 4 or 5 people had SLR style housed cameras on the trip. The rest either had a GoPro style camera or an iPhone housed camera. These smaller cameras are actually great for this type of shooting. It’s all natural light, up close, and in your face. Battery life can be a problem, so be prepared to recharge on the fly. There is some diving!One the sixth day in Mag Bay, the plan was to start the return voyage back to Cabo by noon. This left enough time for a couple of dives on a 200-year-old shipwreck at the mouth of the bay. The conditions were fine if a bit silty with 30-40 feet of visibility. The highlights were a few sealion flybys and lot of common octopus roaming about the rocks and wreckage. Not much of the ship remains except for the two gigantic steel boilers. The rest are just flat plates and rubble. If you want to keep your packing and luggage on the light side, you might want to skip the dives and just focus on the snorkeling. Of the 12 guests on the boat, I think about 8 were divers, and only 3 of us did the dives. It was great to get in the water and blow some bubbles, but nothing to write home about and not the focus of the trip. Two thumbs up for Magdalena BayFor sure I will be returning in the future once my wife is ready for this type of adventure again. I think it’s a change of pace for experienced divers and possibly a great way to connect with the non-diving friends and family that you usually only get to share photos with. I hope you all get a chance to experience this amazing part of the world yourselves.
Thanks for the explanation! That would Internets. There are some tests and a database that puports to list this for various lenses. I will double check in a little while.
@Dave_Hicks May I ask how you are getting the entrance pupil locations? Your numbers for the Tamron 90mm differ substantially from my measurements.
Even more interesting would be the option to use the RF2.0x TC 🤩 let‘s wait and pray that the technical data will serve us underwater photographers! There is still the minimal chance that Canon totally screws this up with a humongous minimum focusing distance (MFD) which would render it useless for underwater photography.
I have been using the Marelux single flip adapter with both SMC-1 and Marelux Macrovie +5, +10 & +15 C/U lenses for two years now. Both NA & MX mount the same with the lens protruding a bit in the rear of the holder rather than flat. Single flip is $259.00 and the dual is $299.00 and both come with the installation tool.
Amazing report! Thanks for sharing.
Looks great @Dave_Hicks
The price has been revised to $1899 as well. Happy to see that it is a proper L lens with a drop in filter. As @atus mentions, the possibility of fitting the RF 1.4x TC is also very exciting. Hope it works out.
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This "hole" for the filter should be the "salvation" in order to use the Canon Canon Rf 1.4x which has a part that protrudes a lot, I guess this protruding part fits perfectly inside that new lens. Now for whom that uses 8-15+ Kenko 1.4x + adapter for EF to RF like me it's yet to see if it is worth it to change.
@Zlati what is your experience using the 28mm + fisheye converter, in terms of image quality and adaptability to a housing, when compared to a wet wide lens (like the WWL-1) ? Of course, we lose the zooming capabilities of a 28-60mm + WWL-1, but I'm wondering more about the wide field + IQ. thanks !
es todo correcto,,la producción de subtronic esta parada por falta de componentes electrónicos pero si todo va bien en unos meses empezarán a producir de nuevo....si,the fotocore no quiero ni comentar nada...............ya irá saliendo ese tema en este portal...muchas gracias,,un saludo.
Being a bit of a cheapskate I ordered a large rectangular block of closed cell foam to the dimensions of an existing carry on (about £15-20 GBP) I then cut holes in it to fit the housing and some other components - solis strobes, lenses, camera bodies. I was also able to fit a macbook air into the lid of the carry on. It actually worked pretty well. You can just see the foam in the back of the picture warning - disposable surgical scalpels are (unsurprisingly) sharp. See foreground...
“Better”? Define better. I’d suggest if you’re happy with the image quality of what you’re now doing , why chase nirvana? That can prove frustrating, expensive and often of nugatory gain.
