Up to Baja for a Little While

Heaven, if it exists, must be a very far way away from the world we live in. That conviction is a big part of why I end up driving and flying and paddling and floating way far away into places far from home. Doing so takes money and effort and time and often a very high tolerance of annoyance, pain, and boredom, but if you end up with a few moments -- sometimes even hours -- of the bliss of heaven on earth, then it all seems worth it.

One thing I learned in my recent trip to Baja is that heavenly angels can assume the shape of large schools of corvina that fly in with the tide and strike readily on flies, one after the other after the other, one angel to bless each cast. I caught a few of these fine fish my last time down to Baja, but this time they were really IN. I knew things were going to be good when I reeled up the first one to the kayak, and about a half dozen other 4-5 pounders were swirling and darting around it as though they wanted to get in on the action. It's a wonder that I didn't end up with a double!

Got them on "Wruckers," small clousers tied by my kayak fishing friend Jim Wruck:


And also on bigger whistler-type flies tied by my friend Ben Taylor:


Here too is a video from corvina heaven -- note the music of the breakers in the background (the breakers in heaven mostly break behind sheltering sand dunes, and do not end up smashing your foldable kayak like certain waves of the world):




I should add that there are some demons, too. I lost both of Ben's whistlers to savage, drag-running strikes that ended in cut lines. Demons have teeth (grouper do, and especially pargo do) and there are few fish swimming in these waters that do not have spines sticking out somewhere and even nasty paper-cut scales. After a few days of handling fish and paddles and other salty, wet stuff, my hands were red-speckled with irritating rash. I lotioned them up while on land, but the only way to really stop the pain was to rub them in nice salty water until they hurt so much that you didn't notice it any more. Then I could go ahead and grab the paddle and get back to fishing.

I'd have more pictures for you, but I screwed up and left my camera battery charger home. Pictures were thus precious resources, and I did a bad job of deciding when to use them. On my best day out, I landed two big pargo in the ten pound range, and a couple of grouper in the same category, but I didn't get photos. At the time, some set-net fishers were anchored nearby watching my every move, and for some reason I was shy about taking pictures. They called out in disgust when I released all these fish, and I figured, "OK, I'll show these guys and bring over a big-ass 20 pound grouper for them."

But therein lies a sad tale. My grouper/pargo limit is about ten pounds, and the reason is that they strike like large trucks, and drive immediately for cover. I lost a LOT of lures, fished with wire leaders, in scenarios like this: OK, here I am, trolling along close by the mangroves in 15 feet of water, and starting perhaps to daydream a bit, when WHAMMO!!! The rod is bent down double and is yanked back so hard that the handle is wrapped tight in the deck rigging, to the point where I can barely pull it loose . . . and by the time I get my hand on the reel and turn the kayak away from the mangroves, the line is pointed deep into the mangroves, and only makes occasional pulses . . . the fish is somewhere down there, deeply tangled up, and after a few minutes of futile pulling I give up or the line snaps. Crap.

I tried letting up on the drag so that I could theoretically have an easier time pulling the rod out of the rigging; but then fish just ran against the drag into their mangroves and holes. Cranking down on the drag again would only cause the rod to twist around at strike time and get stuck in the rigging, which made life very hard for me. Once, I yanked so hard and frantically to get the rod out, that I ended up switching off the anti-reverse. The crazy-spooling result was so ridiculous that I had to laugh. I think a big fat pargo was down there somewhere doing the same.

So in the end I was stuck with this kind of thing -- no trophies, but quite a bit better than a glob of seaweed on the hook:


One of the compensations of heaven is that the food is pretty good. It might be better yet if you could get someone else to cook it and serve it, but that's not how it works. I ate fish once a day, never consuming anything more than two or three hours old, and this was the menu for the first several days:

Fish tacos with corvina
Grouper fillet sauteed with olive oil and lemon pepper
Whole pompano grilled over mesquite coals
Snook fillets in garlic butter
Ceviche de Sierra
Fish tacos with spotted bay bass

And of course, I wasted a few shots photographing my food:




Fish that escaped being kept, bled and cooked include: barracuda, lizardfish, hogfish, and scores of beautiful little roosterfish that caught straight from the beach in front of my camp. In fact, I was able sit and sip coffee until I saw one of the rippling roosterfish boils coming within range, and then grab the rod and jog down to the beach and hook up one of these little gems:


Small but extremely scrappy, and I don't see right now how I'm going to avoid going down again sometime closer to peak rooster season.

#1 unpleasant surprise of the trip: not getting a single yellowtail. I unbuttoned one fish that must have been a yellowtail, and then solidly hooked another one right in Puerto Escondido. The fish headed out, burning the drag on its way toward moored sailboats, and I showed my yellowtail rookie-ness by cranking down on the drag until the hooks popped out, straightened. I thought that the drag must be too loose, because jeez, that fish is NOT slowing down . . . but actually the drag was tight enough, and this is just how yellowtail fight. On one day I paddled six miles out to a deep seamount near Isla San Marcos to try for them, and though I saw sea lions and dolphins and finback whales, I did not see a yellowtail. The only thing I actually hooked on that long paddle was a sort of a bad joke:




#1 pleasant surprise of the trip: snook. The first one I got seemed like a pleasant accident (they are very, very tasty as well as fine, attractive fighting fish) but then I realized that when the water was really cold on the incoming tide, the grouper and pargo would shut off and then the snook had a chance at grabbing your lure. On one of my last days of the trip, when I was killing fish to bring back in the cooler, the water turned extremely cold and the grouper and pargo fishing was quite awful:


Yes, it can be tough down there in Baja. Sometimes the wind blows, and sand finds its way into everything. You can watch out carefully for scorpions and stinging jellyfish, and then get a nasty surprise by scratching sensitive chafed areas after cutting up serrano peppers for your ceviche -- owww! Without a hose of fresh rinse water, you and your equipment don't get coated with salt -- you get ENCRUSTED with it. But like I said, in then end it comes up looking like a project well worth the effort.

San Juan All the Way

It was too perfect: at the very end of 155 miles of paddling, finally arriving at San Juan de Nicaragua, I get out of the kayak and walk up to the riverside hotel, dripping and muddy and wearing a ridiculous spray skirt, and join right in with a Mexican song that I happen to know playing on the radio:

Tambien mi dijo un arriero
Que no hay que llegar primero
Pero hay que saber llegar

Which translates roughly to

Also a mule-driver told me
That you don´t have to arrive first,
But you have to know how to arrive

But of course, if I´m going to talk about that trip I should start at the start not at the end -- if going down a big slow river doesn´t merit a chronological narrative, what does?

Day 1: San Carlos to Boca de Sabalos

Trip-start exhiliaration. I am floating in more ways than one as I leave the muddy beach and cruise past town in the mellow dawn. For one, it is simply great to get out of San Carlos. The glow lasts all the way down to a known holding spot called Santa Fe, where I pause to troll a few passes for tarpon. None are showing, and none are biting. After I leave Santa Fe a headwind comes up that will be my constant midday-afternoon adversary. I settle into the hammer-and-anvil feeling that you get when the current is pushing you one way and the wind another. Not that there was enough current to please me on this 32 mile day, four miles of which were spent in more bootless trolling near Boca de Sabalos. I am good and tired of paddling by then, but to not troll that same spot where I hooked up last year, a spot which has mythical status in my teensy little world -- impossible!



Day 2: Boca de Sabalos to Boca de Bartola

Two solid days of trolling at Sabalos (not counted here as travelling days) are planned into my intinerary, with the idea that I could catch a tarpon, get that out of the way, and then paddle the rest of the river in peace and euphoria. It is not to be. I do not get a single strike in 20 miles or so of trolling time. And friends, even Shadbourne Gilmore can get worn out on trolling without a little bit of reinforcement. Resultingly, I am glad to get going downriver, where I splash through the rapids at El Castillo and have a nice river shrimp lunch while watching the turists see the sights I already saw last year (I think El Castillo is pretty heavily overrated, but I am a guy whose ruins cherry was popped at 19 by Macchu Picchu). When I get bored paddling, I enjoy watching the big spaces between the afternoon thunderheads, which is like looking through an airplane window but with fresh air.



Day 3: Boca de Bartola to Boca de San Carlos

More delightfully unexpected rapids push me halfway to San Carlos, and keep me clipping along until the wind comes up. I´m told there is a hotel in this Costa Rican town, but when I check it out, I am looking at the equivalent of the worst dark, depressing, poopy-smelling fleabag room where I used to sleep in earlier days as a trekking dirtbag. No problem, I am prepared with a hammock and tarp, and I head downstream looking for two appropriate trees that are A) not completely choked with vines and jungle flora and B) decently removed from the sandbar habitats of crocodiles, which have started to appear regularly.



The only spots that satisfy the criteria are on the ranchlands of the Costa Rican side, so it is there that I stop and set up. Camping out on my own is very, very delightful after being pampered at the Hotel Sabalos and Refugio Bartola, and I love the feeling of reclining in the clear grassy riverbank with a bit of rum, and watching the full moon rise over the impenetrable wall of jungle on the Nicaraguan side of the river. The background sound of birds and monkeys is thick and riotous in the early part of the night, and then when it clears out a bit closer to midnight I hear one particularly beautiful bird call that is like a plaintive descending scale. Pretty enchanting in the moonlight, and probably the peak moment of my river trip.



Day 4: San Carlos to Sarapiqui

My next stop is also in Costa Rica, only this time it will be in the lap of luxury at Cabinas de la Trinidad. The place is run by a meticulous old Tica who must have been quite a beauty in her time. Like at Hotel Sabalos, I am the only guest (there was one other couple at Bartola) and I get royal treatment with complimentary REAL coffee for a change, instead of the instant stuff that Nicaraguans always use. Having watched spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys from the kayak as they flew around in the canopy, I finally spot my first howler monkeys here at the hotel, probably because they are habituated to humans. You hear them all the time, morning and night on the river, but they are very hard to spot. When I´m on my way out the next day, they do something that infuriates me: they climb into the branches over my launch spot and start pissing and crapping all over the area! Intentionally, I feel sure! I probably should laugh, but I know it´s going to be a long day and I´m anxious to get going. For a few monkey turds that float on the surface, big fat carp-like fish rise up and take like trout take grasshoppers. Idea: brown balsa popper, plain without feathers, the Monkey Turd.



Day 5: Sarapiqui to San Juan de Nicaragua

Like day 3, the current helps me through about ten miles of the morning, and then deserts me completely. The very last leg of the trip comes after a confluence where 80 or 90% of the river goes down the Rio Colorado into Chile, while I´m left with a very shallow, slow 10% for twenty miles. Also, the notion of the Indio-Maiz jungle reserve seems to break down here, and there are people sitting in front of their little farm shacks along the way, mutely gawking at the gringo as though he were a two-headed space alien. After years of being an outsider in Japan and elsewhere, this still annoys me. But the day has treats in store. Eventually, I begin to hear the breakers of the Caribbean coming over the freshened air, and they crescendo into a very cool moment of beaching the kayak and climbing over a sand dune to see the whooooole enchilada spread out before me. Like I told some guys, to see the wide open sea after a week on a jungle river was quite ¨emocionante.¨




San Juan de Nicaragua itself is, among dreary, filthy, impoverished sites of human habitation, truly the holiest of holies. Its location has been moved a few times, and its name changed twice already, and if it was ever worse than now, I don´t want to imagine it. The Nicaraguan socialists seem to have sensed the need for intervention, and have poured money into projects that all are brazenly announced with big placards placed in front of the sites, signs which go so far as to announce the amount of money invested: ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Agua Potable. Costo: $2,600,000.¨ ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Sitio Turistico. Costo: $190,000.¨ Yet, you notice that power is only on for three hours every day, and the piped water is so unreliable that the locals hoard it in plastic barrels, and especially that the Tourist site, a big concrete monstrosity labeled ¨Brisas del Mar Bar and Grill¨ has no bar and no food and contains only one rather addled looking fellow who spends the entire day listening to a radio held up to his ear.

You´re going to think I´m making this up, but, while my head was dancing with maxims of trade liberalism, I actually MET a group of government functionaries. Or whatever you call them. They came to town in their own private motorboat, and stood out much as gringos do -- they were well dressed, well fed, and goofy. I watched as they took a bunch of pictures on the dock, including a set shot where the subject jumped up in the air and was photographed with waving hands. Eh? I ran into them in the better of the town´s two restaurants and asked where they were from. They´re from Nicaragua! They are a group of lawyers and engineers tasked with deciding how the national funds will be spent. They are touring the area, assessing sites. As I listen, I realize that these are the very guys that make me lean toward economic liberality. I always ask, ¨who are you going to trust to make all the decisions on what to produce, and how much of it, and where investment should be concentrated -- in some bunch of humanly error-prone government goobers like the Soviet trade ministry, who fucked up not just their own massive country but much of Europe, too?¨ And here were the goobers, joking around and having a fine time in San Juan de Nicaragua. Their sense of fun was infectious and I couldn't not like them. At one point I almost got offended, thinking that the chief lawyer was mocking gringo-accented Spanish; but no, he explained, that was how the crazy Costa Ricans talk! I´m sure they had some good laughs at my expense as soon as I left. And I do hope they build the airport they were talking about, as it may be the only way I ever get back to San Juan.

At any rate, it was a trip. I´m very glad I made it. I wish I´d got a tarpon, but what the hell. I don´t wish it bad enough to spend a few more days trolling, and so I have arranged to be heading home from Ortegatown this very afternoon. I´ve barely left the hotel room, where I have feasted well on Champions League highlights and movies. I´ll get the pictures up ASAP.

Viva Nicaragua! and California. No hay que llegar primero, pero hay que saber llegar.

Fice and Rish

Remember this dialogue in The Old Man and the Sea?

"What do you have to eat?" the boy asked.
"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?"
"No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?"
"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold."

If you have read the book (and if you haven´t, do) then you know that that there isn´t really any yellow fish with rice. The old man is salado, and hasn´t caught a thing for 85 days. Yet it is comfort enough for the two impoverished fishermen to regularly perform this lovely ritual of pretending that the fish and rice exist, until it is so meaningful and suggestive as to be nearly symbolic.

Fish and rice-ism has been a part of my fishing imagination for many years, since long before I myself became an old man. I read the book, and I thought I got the meaning. During my years in Japan, the significance of F&R grew deeper for two unrelated reasons. First, the obvious reason, is that Japanese love to serve a simple meal of a whole or split salt-broiled fish and a bowl of white rice, with perhaps a few insignificant pickles on the side. From the start, this struck me as lovely and pure like Santiago´s fish, except of course it was real -- rich, oily delicious, and edifying. And then one day, to humor my girlfriend of the time, I went to a Picasso museum in Hakone that displays numbers of the artist´s handmade, hand-painted plates. And next to almost every plate, there was a photo of the hearty old fellow sitting with a smile of deep satisfaction in front of a plate with a fish skeleton on it, picked clean. Picasso got it, just like Papa.



One of the great delights of this past week in the Solentiname islands has been eating my fish whole, usually within a couple of hours of reeling them up to the kayak. The fishing was pretty good, so I ate pretty good. I threw back at least one rainbow bass that might have gone five or six pounds, and a few of three or four, but the first two and a half pound fish of the day was invariably a goner. I threw in a few pairs of crisp-fried mojarras for variety (or the cook Telma did, after I handed them over) and feasted more or less like an extremely lucky old man.


Fish and rice is healthy, and I think I am already feeling and seeing the benefits of it in my physical well-being. Aside from a bit of pickled chile and some fried bananas and steamed chayote, all I ate was large helpings of fish and small helpings of rice, which in these parts they measure out carefully in a cup and then mold it onto your plate. Breakfast was rice and beans and eggs -- perfect fuel for a dozen-mile day of paddling. I worked up to an 18 mile circumnavigation of Isla Mancarron and had a lovely little adventure out of it.


Though probaby my biggest adventure happened just yesterday, when I was forced to wade-fish while my boat dried out for packing. I waded and floated with my PFD out to a little submerged reed island and promptly caught a 2-3 pounder for dinner. I hung this poor sucker off a flagpost sticking up out of the rockpile (which is there to help boats to locate the shoal) and proceeded to keep casting, catching a few odd fish and a few times diving in after my rockbound lure. On one of these lure rescues, I noticed an odd triangular thing apparently floating nearby. What the heck is that? And then the triangle opened up, and chewed a few times, and I realied that one of the local freshwater crocs was swallowing down a fish not a hundred feet from where I was standing! Yikes. I´d seen these guys a couple times from the kayak and got slightly freaked out, but in this case I was truly concerned. If you wanted to goad an old lizard into a fight, then hanging up a dead fish and standing around up to your waist in the water would probably work well. But of course I wade-floated back to shore safely with all my feet and fingers, so that I can now type the tale here.

While paddling around Mancarron I made a strange catch: a cleverly submerged, illegal set net. the locals tell me that these are really harming the quality of the hook-and-line fishing, and I considered cutting it up with my river knife. But at the time, I had this odd feeling that someone was watching me from the trees onshore . . . so instead of destroying some old Santiago´s net, I went ahead and checked the length of it for any fish, of which there were none, live nor dead. But all this got me thinking about a great aid project for the area: a serious scientific survey of the fish populations, with a report recommending regulatory practices. People will say, probably rightly, that poor hungry islanders will not let regulations get in their way, and that the money to enforce them will never appear. But Never is a very long time, and anyway such a report would be at least as useful as the abandoned recycling plant created by one agency, or the ongoing groundwater well project by ACRA. If I can find a way to promote this idea, it could be a good use of my lovely months of unemployment, which are now a mere two weeks old and going great.



Not that paddling and fishing are bad uses of time. I haven´t cast a line today, but tomorrow I start down the San Juan with a big tarpon rig on the deck. Mmm, sabalo chorizo and rice . . . whether real or imagined, I go to find it soon!

Repeat Offender

One year has past; one year, with the length
Of one technical writing contract! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from Lake Nicaragua
With a soft jungle murmur. --Once again
Do I behold these tarpon jumping in the river
That on a wild and secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more wild Nantucket sleigh rides; and connect
The landscape with the Caribbean Sea.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, in this uncomfortably hot internet cafe in San Carlos . . .

From those opening lines of Tintern Abbey I conclude that Wordsworth was, as I surely am, a repeat offender. Remember the kid who always said, whether it was tobogganing down the hill in winter or diving in the pool in summer, ¨let´s do it again!!!¨ ? I am that type, and that´s why I am here again in San Carlos, ready to head out to the Solentiname islands (again) for a bit of bass fishing and paddling conditioning before heading (again) downriver in my kayak.

Here is my rap sheet, my list of offenses repeated and aggravated over time:

• 3 times to Peru; knocking about, trekking with backpacks, and climbing snow peaks, respectively.
• 3 times to Argentina; catching fewer but bigger fish each time, and finally running the Rio Gallegos in an inflatable kayak.
• 4, 5 times into the Alaskan bush chasing trout, grayling and salmon
• 2 times to Nepal to trek around
• 2 times to Nicaragua to paddle and fish (current!)
• 2 times to Baja to paddle and fish (throwing in the next plan, just for good measure)

Though I am delighted to say that I did not go ahead and violate the wise old saying of the Japanese, ¨A wise man climbs Mt. Fuji . . . once.¨

Of course, the point of going down the hill again is to see if you can do it a little faster, or a little better, or if maybe this time you end up breaking your neck like your Mom warned you would happen. In that vein, I´m going much further downstream on the San Juan this time -- all the way to the Caribbean, if things work out as planned. It´s understood that there will be some delays on the way to troll about and cast for tarpon. I would really, really like to (again) hook up with a big old tarpon and have a Nantucket sleigh ride. Last year´s ride remains one of the clearest memories of my life´s joyful moments. I remember that night I couldn´t get to sleep, I was so full of adrenaline and excitement, even hours after landing the fish. I think that such an experience could provide an effective antidote to a growing condition in which I am at times too plagued with ennui to get out of bed in the morning . . . .

In one of his travel essays Paul Theroux commented that the worst part of travelling in remote parts isn´t danger, as most people think, but rather delay -- the interminable waiting around in the heat for this boat or that plane. At the moment I am killing time prior to boarding a slow boat out the islands. It should get there in time for to do at least a bit of fishing from the dock, but it probably won´t. I occupy about half my time reading Phineas Redux and the other half contemplating the correct actions to take if/when my next Nantucket sleigh ride slows down and becomes a San Juan tarpon anchor. Try backing up to shore with one-arm paddling, as I did once (unsuccessfully) with a big striper on the bay? Carry a decent-size club with me, and try to knock him out at the gunwale and drag him in? Hm. Obviously I have some more thinking to do on this. Fortunately, I have time for it.

Saludos desde Nicaragua!

Mini Baja

As the fishin sabbatical spirit moves forward into a new year, I find my right shoulder still a bit stiff and achey for all the right reasons: dozens of hard-fighting sand bass and grouper, lots of corvina and pompano, and a sprinkling of other species. The fishing in Baja was not a disappointment. On a few occasions the wind conditions were very frustrating, and time (a mere six non-driving days!) was always against me, but al fin y al cabo I am very glad to have made the trip.

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.

Back Setback

What strikes me most about getting old is the diminishing amount of time. As you age, time starts to run out on you. The world, however, stays just as large as ever, and the amount of water you haven't yet fished remains dauntingly immense. You look at what you've accomplished in the first half (or two thirds!) of your life, and you realize that you'd better hurry up and get things done.

Motivated in large part by this general sense of urgency, I packed several activities into the 24-hour period starting last Friday. I grabbed an hour and worked out with weights at the Google gym before ending the work week. Saturday morning, I did a bunch of work on the computer, hunched over it in a typically unergonomic manner. Then I threw the kayak on top of the truck and drove over to paddle ten windy miles on the Petaluma River (no strikes), stopping both before and after to help a friend of mine lift a large band saw in and out of his truck. While we were watching soccer and drinking beer I noticed a slightly odd feeling in my back, but decided to ignore it. After all, I needed to come home at midnight and lift the boat around and hose down all my salty gear before getting into bed. I need my back to just quietly do its job so that I can do the things I do.

I could no longer ignore my back when my eyes opened the next morning. Coming out of sleep, my dreamish mind could have sworn that a heavy specimen of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis was sitting on my lower back and gloating as he twisted around a large, crude spear head that was thrust deep under my right scapula. I am talking REAL pain, so bad that I was genuinely awed by the raw intensity of it. I couldn't move without making the spearhead twist. I couldn't bend my neck down one millimeter from a strangely cramped position. I couldn't even go to work for three days -- I was really and truly down for the count.



If you are an active person who depends somewhat on getting outside for your general sense of well-being, then maybe you can imagine my sinking spirits. All this was especially depressing because it happened in the heart of my paddling ramp-up for a Christmas time sojourn fishing on the Sea of Cortez. They told me it would be windy and tough conditions, and I shrugged it off thinking, "whatever, I'm a pretty strong paddler here." With my rhomboids in spasm, I couldn't even shrug at all! Paddling around in the wind was hard to imagine. Very depressing.

OK, I'll stop whining and cut to the good news: the caveman gave up and went back to extinction on Thursday, and by Sunday I was out on the bay doing an experimental two-mile paddle (no strikes). So far, no recurrence of any bad symptoms, and the flexibility of my neck is back to normal. I'm having high hopes of doing a decent delta paddle this weekend (some strikes? Please?) and going down to Baja as planned.

What is the plan? Basically this: after visiting my favorite uncle in Palm Desert, make the hard drive all the way down to Magdalena Bay, perhaps stopping to do a bit of paddling at San Lucas Cove. In fact, I'd go no further than San Lucas but for the poor timing of the season and the worse timing of the tides, which should be pretty extreme around the 12/23 full moon. "Mag Bay," by contrast, will have mellow conditions and tends to fish well year-round I hear. By the time I turn back north, the tides will be better for a couple of stops on the way, the last of which may include some cool paddling around the Enchanted Isles near Puertecitos, which I hope will be interrupted early and often by the strikes of triggerfish, pargo, grouper and perhaps a bonus corvina or yellowtail. We shall see.

One thing's for sure: the phrase, "well, at least you have your health!" is no idle platitude . . . .

Home Truths

On my recent trip back East I saw one friend propose marriage to his girlfriend, helped another friend bury his mother's remains, and helped another friend get into a five-pound smallmouth.

"That's the biggest bass I've caught all year," he said.
"You just haven't been going with the right guide," I said.

It was an intense and rushed five-day weekend back in New England, full of emotional and memorable moments. But like Nick Hornby's Arsenal-based memory in Fever Pitch, my memories of this trip will hinge on my personal obsessions -- on the sharp visual recall of a bronze finned missile sailing through the air, spraying us with lake water as he tail-walked next to the canoe, and breaking the rusted hook on my balsa popper (the guide let his five-pounder get away, intentionally of course).

We got these fish on the same lake that I visited back in a June post. It is a special place partially under protection from Acadia National Park, and its specialness for me is proven by my adamant efforts to carve out an evening to fish there with my old friend in the old canoe that he inherited from me. To clear Tuesday evening I had to dine with my parents Monday evening, which meant rushing out of Massachussetts and doing a hard-nosed six hour drive from weekend party scenes in Northampton. It ain't easy rallying your hung-over buddies to start a Monday morning road trip, but I did it with the motivation of lake water lapping by the shore (see the third stanza).

In a way this lake is truly the home water of my childhood fishing origins, while the Pit River is more my adopted adult home. We go there and regress, with my friend Stroutster usually bringing worms and fishing them under a bobber like we did at age 12. A few years back, I took the hook out of the mouth of a small yellow perch, stuck it back under his dorsal fin (Ow! Sorry PETA!) and before long, no kidding, a big fat smallmouth took that bobber for the ride of its life. On this latest trip we operated under the all-artificials rules for October, with Strout taking his fish on a krocodile spoon I had left over from Alaska, and me working poppers on the floating line. I guess we may be finally growing up.

Ah, and we all know where that ends! Let me tell you that, after helping my friend bury his mother, I went straight back to my parent's home and gave my mom a pretty urgent hug. Inevitably, we fell to talking about hers and my father's wishes for the scattering of their remains, and her answer briefly took my breath: she named the very lake I have been writing about. She and my dad too, have had some special times there. I have fished with both of my grandfathers, now dead, on that lake.

So it makes sense why they would want it to be their final resting place, this beautiful glacially carved lake full of healthy fish. It makes sense, too, that I keep wanting to go back there to connect up with so many factors: with my childhood joy, with the sense of being together with my parents and grandparents, with the real sense of bonding with my fishing buddy, with the sense of being young and being older too, with the sense of beauty all around and peace inside -- to wit, if I may continue Nietzscheanly in this sappily symphonic vein of prose -- to have a strong and acute sense of just BEING.

I'm afraid I could keep going on with this psychobabble and philosobabble. That's what you get when you take a personal passion like Arsenal football or fly fishing and make it the main organizing factor in your life. But this is a fishing blog, so let's not let it stray to far into the author. Let's think about getting back to that lake in Maine in August (following the proposal-friend's marriage) when they'll be even more aggressive to topwater flies, and maybe even taking the time to get out to storied spots like West Grand Lake on the kayak. In the end, though, pound-for-pound, the bass from a certain lake on MDI are the heaviest of any.