Brown Pelican near Coronado Islands

This brown pelican pen and ink illustration was inspired by a photo I snapped during a fishing trip off the Coronado Islands south of San Diego.  A literal flock of pelicans followed our boat and performed a repeated flight pattern; soaring up close to the boat, landing in the water hoping for fish to be dropped and later taking off again to catch up with the boat.  I took about 100 photos and selected the one used here as the basis for my illustration.  We caught more pelicans than fish this day.  Between the pelicans and the sea lions it made for a difficult day of fishing.  Several yellow fit tuna were caught by others on the boat, but one of them lost its tail after being snapped up by a sea lion.