Austral Winter, Part One

If things keep going as planned, my fishing trips this winter are going to have a decidedly Austral flavor.  I'm still going to do my very Boreal Baja trip for the solstice and new year (see previous entry for an example).  However, with a long week of Australian fishing under my belt already, and a couple weeks of Patagonia planned for February, there should be a lot of fishing going on down on the bottom half of the planet!

The November Down Under trip almost didn't happen, thanks to my distaste for being cooped up with other people in an airplane.  If it were just me and the stewardesses hanging out in the white noise of the cabin, it would probably be my favorite hobby ever. Instead, in reality, it is hours of bad air and baby screams and uncomfortable sleep.  But sometimes you just gotta suck it up and go, especially when your Uncle Larry is paying for a business class ticket, and so I did.

Ah, but not without sticking in a nice spell of my own flying (economy class) from Melbourne to exotic Mackay!  Why Mackay?  One reason: the Whitsunday islands.  Excellent advice from an Australian kayak fishing forum got me pointed that direction in search of sweet beach camping and unusual grabs among the reefs.  My expectations were fairly high, and all were met.  Look at my first camp at Crayfish beach:

That's a pretty sweet beach camp, and it was all mine for two nights.  And there were indeed grabs!  Initially I wasn't very optimistic, after hearing the ferry operator talk about things.  "Oh yeah, my cousin does the caretaking at the old Hook Island Resort (my takeout/return point) and he hasn't been catching anything.  He likes to watch boats come out, fish a spot, get nothing, and then motor away so that another boat can come and do the same in the same spot.  Not much fishing right now.  But for me, I'd rather watch grass grow."

That doesn't sound great; but therein lies a bit of a tale that I'll end this blog with.  Meanwhile, I'll say that there was plenty of fishing at Crayfish beach.  Without even getting in the boat, I could wade out onto the reef at low tide and cast a Crazy Charlie out over pools between 1-3 feet deep, and hook something almost every time: little yellow striped fish, little grouper-ish fish with spots, and sometimes some hard-pulling medium sized blue/purple characters that I'd never seen before but look vaguely like a triggerfish.  Pargo-ish characters put some pretty savage grabs on trolled lures that made me think they were at least twice as fat as they ended up being:

Better yet, there was a mangrove-lined back bay that was full of eager snapper that took both clousers and topwater -- and who were very tasty served up with a spicy rub and some noodles.

I missed the big one though. On day two there, something big grabbed my popper fly as soon as it landed and took off FAST for the reef. I couldn't stop it, and got snapped off; a trevally? It had a silver back and might have been two feet long. I was howling about that snapoff for sure.  In what my old buddy Strouster might consider "luck," I wasn't quite done snapping off big fish, either.  Days later, after I'd gone back to the mainland and asked some questions about barramundi at a tackle shop, I ended up at Proserpine Lake. After much trolling and "flipping" (weighted plastic fish trap-like lures), a light turned on and I got two solid hookups within a 20 minute window. One was huge, like a meter-long tarpon, and immediately flung the lure back in my direction after one awesome jump. With hands shaking I kept at it and hooked a second, catchable-sized one and finally yanked him close to the boat after some spectacular aerials -- or, I should say nearly catchable, as the line snapped under light pressure just as I was getting out the camera. The fish might have been pushing two feet long, and I think it might have gill-raked my 40# flouro tippet (on 40# braid). I went out the next day using longer pieces of 60, and didn't get a single bump in 4.5 hours of trying, much of the time with my gopro camera running just to get a shot of the jumps. Damn! I really wanted a pic of one of those beasts.

But wait!  I still haven't finished my Whitsunday island observations.  First: it was not kid-glove kayaking.  The massive tidal movements in that part of the world, paired with opposing winds, made it a much-needed exercise in advanced kayaking for me.  Almost immediately upon trolling out of Crayfish Bay going south, I got into a state of full clapotis, with the current rushing south at pace, the considerable southerly wind pushing it into steep waves, and plenty of reflecting waves off the rocky headland to make it crazy and unpredictable.  I knew I shouldn't have been trolling, but didn't dare take both hands off the paddle to deal with it!  Eventually, I was forced to reel up in order to cross a big "potato patch" of standing waves on a rip between the north tip of Whitsunday and one of the points on Hook island, where I had to do a couple of no-fooling low braces to keep from getting capsized.  As I looked back with my lungs pumping and hands shaking, I saw that this little feat had earned a round of applause and whistles from a passing sailboat.

And this is all good; who knows when conditions like that are going to happen in Baja?  I've been dorking around on calm days on the San Luis Forebay and the delta too long, and doing my fastidiously pre-checked Monterey Bay trips, thoroughly vetted for swell and tide and wind.  I'm getting old, but I don't need to get lazy!  Thank you Whitsundays for a wake-up call.

The second observation is that, despite the gloomy prognostications I heard on the ferry, the fishing was nice!  At my Cairn beach camp I had regular grabs from reef fish while trolling about, and also was able to hook nice coral trout on flies cast right from the beach.  And those puppies are TASTY.  Probably the nicest coral of the trip came to hand just in front of the Hook Island Resort, where I was killing time waiting for the ferry, and (unbeknownst) being watched on binoculars from the resort's windows.  Finally the caretaker, a really friendly guy (I didn't run across a single unfriendly Australian) came strolling down the beach to talk.  This was the cousin who wasn't catching anything, and so he seemed pretty surprised that a California geek in a kayak was doing pretty darned OK right on his front porch.



I shit you not, that nice fellow actually helped carry my gear over the beach to the ferry, and asked me for a selfie shot before we left.  I was feeling pretty good about the world.  Though, later that night I kind of wished I'd kept the coral trout pictured above to fry and enjoy and prolong the Whitsunday joy just that much longer.  I'm cultivating my Sydney office contacts and seriously thinking about hauling the kayak back there to general area of the Great Barrier Reef, which is as far as my venerable old Feathercraft Kahuna has every gone from home.

But as always, as far as "home" goes, it's where your hat hangs just right.  I got into the groove camping on the beach and loved every second of my warm, humid, unscheduled life.  Which is, of course, how vacationing should be. I was pleasantly drunk on fresh warm air and maybe just a little Bruichladdich CC01 or Laphroig PX Cask from duty free when I mistook a turtle fin for a shark fin and went out to cast the popper for a shark take.  But it's all good, right?

Baja Best Yet

A trip like the one I had last month in Mexico deserves a blog.  Unambiguously, it was my best Baja trip yet, the pinnacle instance of my little midwinter ritual of making a ridiculously long drive to camp out and fish from my kayaks on the shores of the Baja peninsula.  I was pretty happy with last year, which was the first year that I felt like I really got the camping solitude fully wired.  But this year, two factors combined to overcome my own physical deterioration (from age) and limited paddling ranges, and make it the best ever: friendly winds, and willing fish.

On night one, I must say, the weather omens were not looking good.  I sat and watched a distant lightning show as I sipped the evening scotch in my wonderful elephant-tree camp, but didn't feel a drop.  I've had this experience a few times before in the desert, where you get to see and hear a distant storm, but never actually feel a single raindrop falling on your head.

That didn't happen this time.  What did happen, was that a few hours after lying down, I woke up to an incredibly intense rain storm: lightning cracking apparently right over my tent, deafening thunder blasts, and POUNDING, pounding rain.  Just to be safe wind and dew-wise (an issue on the Pacific coast) I take a 3-4 season tent that has withstood severe conditions in Alaska, so I felt pretty confident that I could just sit and listen, and maybe stick my head out if the sheets of rain stopped falling. 

WRONG.  Randomly, I put my hand down on the floor of the tent, and guess what?  It was soft!  Kind of like it had a giant inch-deep puddle under it!  And that indeed was the case.  That's not good; that's bad.  Even in my post-scotch sleepiness, I quickly realized I had to get out of my warm dry sanctuary and do something -- like get out my folding shovel and dig a trench in splashing mud while marble-sized raindrops pelted me mercilessly.  It worked, and I got the water flowing around the tent instead of under it.  But it was not a pleasant part of a restful night.

The next day was also unperfect: on arrival in Santa Rosalia, a Norte was blowing up whitecaps on the Sea of Cortez.  Old and pragmatic, and knowing of a really sweet underpriced hotel with nice rooms and killer views, I decided against more bad-weather camping.  However, wind forecasts for the next day were OK, so I did put together my boat and start preparing psychologically to launch in three-foot wakes knocking around the cobblestones of my favorite beach.  The wind stops, yes; but the waves take a good 6-8 hours to quit afterward.

Again, initial omens were not good.  What is this, at the prime yellowtail spot?  Not a yellowtail. Barely any tail at all!

No, yellowtail were decidedly not there at the spot.  This shark, who swallowed a speed jig so far down his throat I didn't dare try to extract it until he was dead, saved the day.  Firm, white meat, and just delicious.

OK, the "best Baja yet" part is about to start.  I got over to the Pacific and settled into a camp at one of my favorite places in the world.  There's always an intense, long, 90-minute sunset there.

And yes, fish were on the bite!  The wind stayed down the entire time, and I fished flies almost exclusively and topwater predominantly.  You couldn't stop the snapper; I think I hooked more than 20 each day out, almost all on topwater.  

And, best of all, the snook were in.  I started small, but each fish seemed to get twice as big as the last one until I landed one that was easily the biggest I've taken on a fly, ever.

So what's better than that, right?  Well, how about prime, calm wind conditions back on the Cortez side, and fairly regular bait bust-ups just off the beach?  Word on the beach was that they were seeing more sardines in the area than they'd seen for years, and that dorado were still hanging around in the cooling water to take advantage of that.  

I trolled topwater-ish dorado treats five miles out to Isla Carmen and never got anything but needlefish (which were swarming).  It was a tough paddle against current and some minor rollers, so I camped out and figured I'd just do a mild 4-5 mile fishing day near camp the second day, and take it easy.  Look who spoiled my plan:

After I'd paddled out about 1.5 miles from camp, my very first speed-jig drop got hit hard, by that fish.  I was sporting 60 pound braid tipped with 100 pound flourocarbon leader on my burliest level-wind setup -- I've been "rocked" by big yellowtail more times than I'd like to admit, so now I prepare -- and I knew what was called for: hauling that fucker up off the bottom with as much pressure as I dared to put on him.  In a kayak, it's more a question of capsizing than breaking that kind of tackle, but I was willing to edge things.  The worst risk is in fact getting cut off on a rock, because the sudden release of pressure causes a fearful recoil, in which you swing fast and hard back from the direction the fish had been pulling.

Not a problem this time. For a good four or five seconds after the bite the fish didn't really react, and I pulled up four or five solid few pump-and-reel motions before he knew he was hooked, apparently.  THEN he ran like a muthah, causing the drag to scream and slamming the rod butt into the cockpit coaming to tow me at an alarming pace . . . but somehow he didn't get into a rock.  Whenever he paused in his shoulder-battering runs, I resumed pumping and reeling, and this went on for ten or fifteen minutes until the fish was up around 150 feet over a 250 foot bottom (I use a line-counting Shimano reel), and hell -- I rested.  I could feel the burn in my shoulders and forearms, and sweat was dripping down my face even in the cool of early morning.  While I rested, the fish, still a mystery but definitely under suspicion of yellowness, pulled the yak around in a large circle.

"Oh -- it's a BOSS yellow" is what I said out loud when I finally got a good look at him. I love eating yellowtail collar and yellowtail belly and hamachi sushi, and there was just no way I was going to let him go.  Yet, as soon as the gaff went into him, things got serious: there goes your restful 4-5 mile day. It is now a 15 mile day of breaking camp and packing the kayak and churning against rising afternoon winds to get back to the mainland shore where there is a cooler full of ice where all that fish meat can be made safe.  

I made the trip and I butchered the beast (while rioting seagulls shat all over the camp), and I ate the delicious collar.  

The whole next day was devoted to eating and preparing to eat the fish: sushi with ramen for breakfast; ceviche for lunch; extended fish-smoking through the afternoon (with testing/snacking) followed by a super-delicious, fatty belly.

But even after all that "resting," I was physically spent.  Fighting that damn bicho had caused some stringy, sore spots in my 50 year-old shoulder and forearm and lower back; and doing 24 miles in two days didn't help.  I should have either a) ended the trip right there, or b) taken a four-five day rest, which was impossible given my work/vacation window.  So I went with c), a desperate one-day run back over to the Pacific to see if I could get an even dreamier snook to go with my dream yellowtail.

The fishing wasn't bad -- lots more snapper, a grouper dinner -- but the most notable event was a big snapoff, where a strong fish (the dream snook?) ran me hard into the mangrove roots and even broke the tip of my 8wt to rub it in.  Maybe I could have stopped him when I was still fresh in the first days of the trip, but I wasn't fresh.  I was done. Stick a fork in his ass done.

However, you would have heard no complaints, because what was really done, to perfection, was my best yet Baja winter solstice trip. I looked back at earlier trips, and realized that in tough years, like 2014, I only got a handful of days to paddle and fish amid endless bad wind.  It was the opposite in 2017, for sure: so much of a blessing that it kind of became a curse as I paddled and fished (and caught!) my way to total exhaustion.  Will I try again next year, knowing it could go either way?  Bet on it.