Because the wind was blowing so badly at my planned first stops on the Sea of Cortez, I ended up camping in Bahia Concepcion on Christmas Eve. The bay is decently sheltered and extremely lovely, but it is a place where the fish-to-gringos ratio is not overly favorable. Nonetheless, I was pretty happy to paddle out on Christmas morning and not get skunked, thanks to this nicely wrapped little grouper:
On this first day I was still too fresh and naive to complain about the limited size of the fish I was catching, and the conditions and scenery quite made up for the middling fishing. I was having a great time paddling around and peering down into the aquarium of clear, still water.
And if I thought I was going to be a big anti-social Scrooge loner, I was quite mistaken. The retirees and families camped out on Playa Coyote made sure I attended the big Christmas day beach party, which included a roast turkey and a pinata!
Yes, it's lovely to have a drink with the cheerful Americans and laugh at the kids swinging at the Pinata . . . but let's go find some fishing, is what I was thinking after two days of this. I crossed over to general area of Bahia Magdalena on the Pacific side and embarked on a very long, hot, and at times desperate search through a maze of unsigned dirt roads.
At one point on this backroads adventure, I drove right into a sort of ambush -- suddenly, out of nowhere, two hummers full of soldiers rolled up behind me! One guy walked up to my window while another guy covered him with a very large machine gun. The interrogation was brief: Where are you going? What are you going to do there? (literally, "a que se dedica?" which strikes me as very poetic phrasing) and, Do you have a map? When I answered "not really" to the last question, the soldier made a funny whistling sound and waved me on my way.
With perseverance and creative use of GPS tracking, I got to the water just in time to set my boat up and wet a line before dark fell. Damn. And the next morning, the wind blew up! My little camp had some good shelter from the breeze, but that wasn't the point: with both the wind and tide running against me, I had my work cut out for me.
After a couple of hours of struggling just to move forward at 2mph and keep a line in the water, I was beginning to wonder if the guy who wrote The Baja Catch was perhaps just playing a big joke on the gringos, making them drive thousands of miles on sketchy roads only to get blown around on marginal water, all for the sake of a few perch-sized fish. But right in time, I paddled over a spot that soon earned the name, "Groupertown."
On the first pass I got slammed by a five-pound grouper. Nice! And then on the second pass a three-pounder, the third pass a six pounder, and so on, and so on. Somewhat to my embarrassment, I confess that I spent the better part of a ten-mile trolling day going back and forth over an area the size of a bowling lane. I think I exhausted the patience of the broomtail grouper after a point, because suddenly I started catching spotted bay bass after bass. I widened the area by a couple of bowling lane widths and lengths, and started picking up the odd corvina as well. Nice! That night I went to the tent quite tired, quite satisfied, and quite well fed on sauteed grouper fillets.
By now my linear bay-to-bay narrative is probably getting good and boring . . . but I am compelled to record that the next day on the lagoon was about the best day of salt kayak fishing I've had yet in my life. I'll let the pictures tell the story of this windless, sweet, six-species day on the water with the surf booming against the dunes and the tide sweeping against the mangroves . . .
By the time I quit that afternoon, my arm was completely worn out. A couple of groupery strikes had gone running against my 25-pound drag right into the mangrove root depths, never to come out again. I got one nice corvina to the boat, but lost another one that dove straight under the boat and nearly up-ended me. With bigger fish in close quarters, a strange fact of kayak fishing becomes quite evident: if the fish can run your drag, then fighting it is not so much an act of reeling the fish to the boat as it is a matter of first being pulled by the fish, and then gaining some line and losing some position as the fish -- still 'green' -- and the kayak meet at an uncomfortable halfway point. The grouper, of course, render this irrelevant by running into irretrievable cover.
But this is not complaining. I was in seventh heaven. An appetizer of tai sashimi made a wonderful prelude to grilled pompano and corvina gluttony:
The morning after that perfect day, my back and shoulders were telling me very clearly that I needed a rest from paddling and fighting dozens of fish. Reluctantly, after three days of sweet solitude in which I never spoke to a single person gringo nor Mexican, I realized it was time to drive back out and get a bit of rest, ice and fresh water (all of which were in short supply by then). With an open schedule, I'm sure I would have had a hotel night in Ciudad Insurgentes and headed back in. With my tight schedule, I planned to go over and give the Cortez side one more go.On the way out, I saw a couple of locals who had driven down a road that I had dared not drive . . . and turned out to be right! As I suspected, that road led to a much more convenient camp that could have saved me considerable effort fighting tidal currents. But it was very damp this year:
It is a point of no small pride for me that my little gringo-piloted Toyota Tacoma pulled a big Ford out of the mud, and not the other way around.To make a long bay-to-bay story short, I drove over and got blown off the water one more time, making me one for three on the Cortez, and two for three on the Pacific (having failed to get there in time to fish the first day). A heck of a lot of driving for three days of fishing! But the fishing was terrific, and the driving an adventure in itself -- if you have ever driven on those narrow mountain roads down there, you know what I mean. It was a mini Baja trip that thoroughly convinced me that a full-sized Baja trip is going to have to happen before too long. And to be sure, I would have driven even further for those few sweet days in camp. May there be many more in 2008.
