Lat: 33 21.183 N
Lon: 117 53.866 W
It was the most awesome number of Dolphins I've ever seen, the group was at least 1 nautical mile wide, and hundreds of kilometers deep. My rough guess is there were at least 5,000 of them, without exaggeration.
At first sight we thought it was a school of tuna, but as they approached, all we saw were Dolphins, many of them youngsters. As our courses converged, I killed the engine and practically drifted through the middle of the group (very little wind); it took about 15 minutes for them to swim past. It was far and away the most incredible thing I've ever seen, over 30 years of sailing!
Sadly these photographs don't even begin to do justice to this experience -- it was unlike anything I've ever seen. There were literally thousands and thousands of them! It was freaking awesome! If you look really hard, you might be able to get an idea of what it was like. Consider that all of the white water in the background was caused by the dolphins.
The picture below is just another Southern California sunset...
[Edit 2019-10-25] About to post a link to this blog, I went to use OpenCPN (chart plotter) and discovered that the latitude I originally stated (32 21.183 N) couldn't possibly be correct, it's in Mexican waters and we were not. It had to be 33 degrees, which is a little under 12 nm from Dana Point Harbor.
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