Sure, the sea lions at the Children's Pool are cool, but one local marine-life enthusiast turned it way up last Monday when he spotted a pair of the pinnipeds herding and hunting a school of fish near Scripps Pier.
Vishwas Lokesh, a Sorrento Valley resident who's lived in San Diego for about six years, spends a lot of nights hunting bioluminescent blue waves, which he first saw off Torrey Pines in 2018. During the days, though, when the digital-security engineer is not busy working, he tracks the pier's surf cams, and late in the afternoon on May 29, he saw what he described as a lot of fin activity.
"The fins were popping up, and it was going in circles," Lokesh said. "So that's, like, indicative of a bait ball, like it's trying to hunt. So I thought it was dolphins, by the shape of the fins that were coming out, but it was the flippers of, uh, sea lions, actually."
Lokesh jumped in his car and headed down to the pier, monitoring the cams on the way. At one point, when he saw no activity, he considered giving up, but persevered instead.
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"I was like, 'OK, maybe it'll still happen again,' " Lokesh recalled. "So I made the drive and then spent some time there, and, yeah, it did, it did happen again."
Now at the pier at about 7:30, he quickly set up his drone and … nothing. His patience paid off, though, when he spotted a pair of sea lions circling some fish, flashing silver and black, herding the school into a tight ball and darting in for snacks. Unlike dolphins, though, the sea lions were not working in tandem. Lokesh thinks one of them chased the other off, forcing it to abandon its meal, then returned to the prize.
The fish and their hunters were about 400 feet offshore to the north of the pier, Lokesh said. Sadly for him and us, the May Gray owned the skies, but he still got great video of the experience, which, for him, lasted about 40 minutes — about as long as his drone battery lasted — but he could see it happening afterward. He said he had been trying to get just such a shot for the past two or three years, ever since he got his drone.
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Lokesh's enthusiasm relating his marine video adventures is infectious.
"I was really like, just beyond joy … I was blasting music in my car when I was driving back home," Lokesh recalled. "I was so happy. Like, just seeing it, it was like seeing Planet Earth, uh, in real, like, I mean, you don't get to see these like in real, right? Like, not like — it's always on the TV that you see, like, shows like this, but never in real. So I was, like, really thrilled."
So how's Lokesh gonna top this? A bait-ball lighting up in bioluminescence would be epic, he said.
