My Annoying Friend Rick

Weather forecasts are a fisherman's friend, but they sure can be an annoying one. I can't count how many times I have backed off from a good plan -- an early winter weekend on the Pit River, or a long day with perfect tides on the delta -- only to find that the snow predicted at 2000 ft. never fell, the 20-30 m. p. h. gusts never blew. This gives you a feeling of having been cheated, and not by Nature, which is always fair though often fickle. You feel like you have cheated yourself by listening to fool's forecasts.

However, last week around this time I found myself saying this to my new fishing partner JT: "I hate running from weather reports, but this one is a hurricane report . . . ."

I refer to reports of the ominous reports of Hurricane Rick, who at the time had just been upgraded from Tropical Storm to Hurricane and given his oh-so-scary and menacing name. He was headed, by almost all projections, directly toward the lower part of the Baja peninsula. Of course, I was planning to approach lower Baja that same night from the opposite direction.

I'd already caught some whiffs of Rick from wunderground.com forecasts, and they didn't look good. In an area so dry they usually don't bother making bridges across the rivers, clouds and rain were forecast for mid-week. This alone would have interfered with me and my plans, because I do like driving off on primitive dirt roads and camping primitively on the beach, away from big gringo RVs. Even if I had my 4WD truck instead of a Cabo rental car, this would be bad news.

From Fishin Sabbatical

Plus, along with the rain forecasts, they were forecasting unusually strong winds up to 40 m. p. h. both in the morning and afternoon. I paddle in decent winds like any other really commited sea kayaker, and I do it because you inevitable get caught in them and must be prepared to handle them. But I ain't stupid enough to paddle out when it is already whitecapping at first light. And when those winds are part of a thing called a Hurricane, whatever its name? I think not.

The storm was basically forecast to keep me on shore for several days or more, gutting my trip. I had a sinking feeling from the start that cancellation would happen, but nonetheless got busy hunting around for information and checking stormpulse.com every ten minutes. Friday was not a restful day. Some people I consulted just said "Go for it," and I was sorely tempted to do so. I thought maybe I could hide out inland in a hotel in Ciudad Constitucion for a couple boring days while the storm passed and then get back to fishing. But other voices, from bulletin boards frequented by expats actually living in Baja, told a different tale:

If you are there and this one, "Rick" comes through there will be no hotel rooms available. People I have talked to who are there now have all reserved rooms for this blessed event already. If this is like Jimena, which I sincerely hope it isn't, there will be no food, water, electricity, no atms, bridges knocked out, etc. It is NOT the place to be during a hurricane or after, for that matter.

So I did cancel. And guess what? By Saturday Rick got promoted to category 5, and they started saying he was the second strongest East Pacific hurricane on record. By Sunday he was already turning away from a path toward landfall on Baja, and by Monday he was demoted several points down, almost to a mere tropical storm. Rick fizzled out. It turned out to be a best-case scenario, in which I could have gone down and lost one day on the water, if that.

Though in reality, I probably would have been having a very unrelaxed time in a camp on Mag Bay, watching the sky and worrying if my cheap rental car was ever going to get back out of there.

From Baja Winter Solstice Fishin Tour

No matter, there is a new plan, and it is good: the spell of condo livin' and panga fishing that was planned for the end of my trip is now at its beginning, and the forecasts look wonderful for the foreseeable future at the tip of Baja. I'm going to hang out and fish with some friends, paddle a new area for new pelagic species, and probably drive off to spend a few days in my little remote fishing heaven down there. Personally, I'm forecasting a flurry of dorado with occasional 40-80 pound gusts of striped marlin and yellowfin tuna. We shall see.

Snake Pits and Hornet's Nests

My last entry described a fairly ideal campsite, and this one is kind of going to describe its opposite. They can't all be perfect, can they? Neil Kelly (of The Baja Catch) commented that he was known to camp "on donkey turds" in order to get near good fishing. That is correct; that is science: there is some kind of complicated algorithm to describe how the interaction of scenic values, fishing prospects, and weekend/vacation time constraints all add up to a guy sleeping in his truck on a gravel levee. Or look at it this way: in The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paul Theroux paddled freely around a south Pacific paradise, grousing and grouching all the way; balancing the equation from the other direction, I camped last night in a construction site and went into reveries about the joyous romantic values of the setting.

Anyone who has spent some time in the delta knows what I am talking about. When you get back into this giant maze of canals, cuts, and flooded islands, you can momentarily feel like you are in a true wilderness. It can be quiet and vast at times. The tules surround you while the currents whispers through the weeds, a heron lifts slowly into the foggy air with its lonely, rasping cry, and then -- and then on the bank you espy the sixteenth abandoned couch of the morning. The seventh refrigerator. The fifth houseboat, burnt and sunk for insurance purposes.


Weekdays are the best times in the delta, as my last visit with flys4b8 Mike demonstrated very clearly. Our plan was to camp Friday night at Russo's Marina ($20 to camp in basically a parking lot, $10 to launch a kayak), and our error was to not call ahead and ask questions. For instance, we should have asked if Russo's was hosting anything like the weigh-in for one of these rich cultural events known as "fishing tournaments." If you have never witnessed one of these events, let me tell you that it is quite an experience. Not only was the usually-deserted campsite full to the gills, but the lights were kept on all night on a general spectacle of drinking, shouting, bragging about fat fish and fast boats, and, most especially, misdirecting and misinforming the competition about fishing spots and methods. It was a true comedy, and we did settle down and try to enjoy it. But no sooner had the human hullabaloo died down than the diesel thunder began, and guys started backing their trailers down to the water from 3:00 a. m. right up to sunrise in order to get an early start on the day. Both the sound and smell of that prevented any real sleep from happening inside a backpacking tent. I feel sure that the winners of these bouts are the guys who fish best on zero sleep, drunk and/or hungover.

Way down away from the concentrated human activity near Russo's, there is an area of the south delta that feels especially forgotten, empty, and pleasant. There's a run-down marina/resort in the area, of course, but get this: they charge THIRTY dollars for a crap campsite on top of the ten for launching. You gotta be kidding. I'll stay in Motel 6 for 37.99 before I go for THAT. And no, I do not pay those ridiculous launch fees. My general way of getting in the water in this area is to launch ever so carefully from the rocky levees enclosing one of the east-west running canals. There's a bit of wake-dodging to be done on weekend mornings, but then boom, you are right on fishable water and in position to hit prime areas both on the outgoing and incoming tides, as long as you time it right and are willing to paddle a few miles to your fishing. I always am!

Most nights in this particular area, you'll see trucks or vans pulled over near a burning campfire, and several guys, girls and kids sitting in camp chairs next those big, long rods people use for catfishing. Somewhere at the bottom of the canal you presume there is some stinky old bait (mackerel is apparently a favorite, even though no mackerel naturally comes within 75 miles of the spot) and on the end of the rod there are usually bells that jingle when you are getting a bite. Some even have little motion-activated lights on them. Among the crowd there are hardcore catfishers that sit there fishin and drinkin right into the wee hours.

That's interesting (and probaby fun) fishing, though it ain't my particular type. But why shouldn't I follow their example and park on the levee all night? You can't do this everywhere in the delta; most of the "ground" is too wet, and on the raised ground and levees there is a sense that you are sure to be hassled or run off the property if you linger all night. By contrast, on this levee it seems to be OK to park and fish all night long. How about if you pull your truck up, put out a chair with a rod next to it, and make like you are catfishing all night when in fact you are inside the camper shell trying to get some rest for the next day's striper fishing?

This basically did work out for me. I'm not saying that it is perfectly restful nor that a few random trucks won't drive by in the wee hours, rousing you with Deliverance-type concerns. But I am saying that it is a practical way to not get gouged for third-rate camping, and I'm also saying that there are recommendable pleasures in it as well. The stars aren't as bright as in the sierras, but there is still an odd sense of the immense sky, ringed as it is by a ground horizon sprinkled with faraway lights. The wind farms on the hills look like weird Christmas tree farms, with red blinking lights going on and off in sychronization. You know that there's a lot of human habitation out there, but it is comfortably far away and the immediate surroundings are very quiet and peaceful. I sat in my camp chair with an abbey beer taking all this in, and even reached that sublime level of night-outness where I spontaneously talk to myself like Nick Adams. I thought about the hotel alternative in Tracy, with all the freeway noise and meth-heads in the next room, and said aloud, "I'm only going back into that hornet's nest if they make me."

As Thoreux wrote in Fresh Air Fiends, "My ideal in travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cites are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent." A levee in the delta ain't exactly the bush, and I didn't exactly dare to pitch my tent there, but you see what I mean. I was perched just on the fringe of the snake pit, the hornet's nest.

And yes the fishing was pretty good. Still no stripers of size for me, but I got a decent one on topwater Friday night, and then had a really good run of 2-4 pounders Saturday morning on the incoming tide. I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I have started a new career of camoflage levee camping. I hope to refine this practice as the striper season heats up through November. For I did spy some nice flat areas right near where the train tracks go through, and trains only make an enormous racket five or six times during the night . . . looks promising!