I’m a long way from home when I locate a spot to set up Tres Bocas, the fishing camp I imagine launching in the heart of the best fly-rod sport I’ve found in thirty-five years casting flies into the Baja surf. The campsite lies just above high water, a low stoop laced with thorny scrub. Tall dunes flank the site before falling sharply into the bay. There’s protection from the stinging afternoon winds, or at least the sense you’ve dropped down off the gusty decks of a seafaring cutter. Yet any spot lower to the water will find itself threatened by new and full moon tides or storm surge driven by savage summer chubascos.
There are other challenges, as well. The site is too small for more than a handful of modest tents, including the cooking and dining canopy, where guests will convene for stiff drink and Spartan fare. If a real backfiring snorer shows up, he or she would need to be banished to the dunes, not necessarily a deal breaker, because the worst that happens there involves curious coyotes. The site also sits a fair distance from the remarkable surf fishing, a vigorous hike across dunes blistering in midday sun, busy with bull snakes and chuckwallas and the like in the low light favored by savvy anglers.
And though it seems trite to worry about it, the site faces east, deprived of soul-stirring views of sunsets over the Pacific, although a couple of dawns overlooking the bay, sunlight peeking through thunderheads above the peninsula mountains and the spectral shadow of the mangrove, should ease any longing for the sublime, if not the crease of a fine-edged hangover.
Still, one obstacle to the site I’ve found for Tres Bocas may prove insurmountable: me. Despite logistical challenges, the Tres Bocas surf-fishing camp would have every chance for success were it not woven into the ludicrous fantasy of me running a fish camp. Ignore, for the moment, that there’s nothing in my talents or temperament remotely suited for such a role. Like so many restaurants, wineries, blog sites, and other late-in-life startups, Tres Bocas would be doomed from the start by a fundamental disregard for profit or even solvency. Instead, all I’d seek is to surround myself with friends who come to enjoy the fabulous sport and wilderness scenery.
And I certainly don’t want to reveal to anglers far and wide the exact whereabouts, give or take, of the best fly-rod surf fishing along the Baja Peninsula and arguably anyplace else in the world.
Does surf fishing still hold sway in the collective imagination of modern fly anglers? I can only hope. Surf fishing invites us to understand tides, weather, the moon. It demands intimacy with the behavior and habitat of wild animals that move with the rhythms of the earth through the cosmos. Each session, you face, by way of contrast, your own inconsequential self and your dire need to prove you’ve learned a thing or two along the way.
I leave Madrina, my home-built double-ended beach yawl, resting on the sand as the tide continues to retreat from the site of the improbable fish camp. Opposite the direction of the nearby boca, the shoreline dunes rise above the current as if the banks of a desert river filing its long story in stone. At water’s edge, I follow a contour of moist black sand, firm footing without the scalding grip higher up on the sun-blanched dunes.
A commotion out on the surface of the bay grabs my attention. Dolphins. For two weeks now, I’ve spotted clusters of them thrashing about, tearing up the water. So wild and unusual are these antics, the rambunctious gyrations throwing wakes visible a mile away, I’m all but convinced it’s mating behavior, perhaps the act itself. On a sail north to a new boca, I aimed Madrina toward a pod of these frisky dolphins, approaching rapidly on a beam reach with the aid of a stiff onshore breeze. Before I got within camera distance, however, the show shut down. Madrina and I fell farther and farther behind as the dolphins surged off in a pack, driving a running wave up the steep base of the dunes.
Now suddenly they’re nearly on top of me.
Wakes. Boils. Explosions of white water. Flanks of gray flesh flash through the churned and lathered whorls. A dolphin rockets through the deep water barely a step offshore, only to spin onto its back, exposing the length of its perfectly white belly, now speeding ghostlike directly toward me.
Wait — what’s that? In front of another dolphin — this one also spun belly up, accelerating toward shore — a sparkling corvina leaps from the tinted water and lands flopping on the steep pitch of sand. In a rush of wave and wake and white water, the beak of the dolphin instantly appears, snapping as if a pair of hedge shears tidying up the base of the dunes.
The corvina?
Lonche, amigo.
Up and down the beach, dolphins appear and disappear as if bats bristling from out of the dark. At other moments, the surface of the bay looks like a Vatican fountain burbling at break of day. I try to snap photos, only to jump back from the water to dodge a dolphin as it engulfs its prey and pivots away from shore, its flukes slicing the air. Frisky, my ass. Amused that I’ve mistaken this kind of feeding assault for mating behavior, I recall catching calico bass long ago with my buddy Peter Syka and pointing out that the fish seemed either to be in spawning colors or feasting to prepare for or recover from that critical stage of the year.
Peter looked out at the kelp beds, the canopy of honey-colored fronds rising and falling with a gentle swell.
“I think that pretty much covers it,” he said.
Hunt for fish long enough in the surf and you find yourself slipping into the cadence of the tides. You become, like fish themselves, an object of the action. Whether conscious of it or not, you grow increasingly sensitive to the direction of tidal flows, the stage of the tide, the period of inactivity as the tide falls slack, at rest while the rotating earth creates the illusion of forces from one direction yielding to those from another.
I’m scrunched into the shade beneath the boat tent, reading Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, when I hear the first wavelets of tide patter along Madrina’s garboard and keel. I shift my weight: nothing. We’re still on the hard. I return to the details of Edgar Watson’s murder in the Ten Thousand Islands of southwestern Florida, territory resonant of the esteros and tide channels and mazes of mangrove that make up Baja’s Magdalena Bay. Chapters later, Madrina comes alive, stirring against the press of tide. I poke my head outside — and curse. The bucket of water I used to wash my feet before stepping over the gunwales remains weighted to the mud. My Crocs, however, have vanished in the current.
Things happen. I pull my wading shoes from the clutter of lines on the forward deck. The shortest hike to the prime fishing reach carries you through the maze of sand dunes between the bay and the surf-lined beaches. Along the way, I happen upon landmarks I recognize — the mangled lobster trap, a shredded blue tarp, the perfectly intact skeleton of a dolphin, valley of the sand dollars, the velodrome dune — but rarely traces of myself, as the wind obliterates footprints as surely as a blizzard blowing snow.
A beach, of course, never looks quite the same one visit to the next. At least not to an angler, a surfer, or anyone prepared to read what appears at any moment on its open page. Tides, wind, the size and shape and direction of the surf, even the shifting sand, all conspire to tell an ever-changing story, a plot that shifts daily, hourly, even wave by wave.
Still, this one always seems too good to be true. As I come out of the dunes and cross the broad sweep of shell-crusted sand, remnant of storms and highest tides that breach the beach berm and leave water lapping at the base of the dunes, I imagine a guest or client seeing this spot for the first time. If this isn’t enough, I say, gesturing toward the water, if just walking up to this spot doesn’t satisfy you, I don’t know what to say.
Even if we don’t catch a fish.
It’s not that it’s pretty. Not in the sense of tropical beaches, crystalline waters caressing the recesses, say, of shapely coves nestled into the confines of quiet reefs beneath impossibly blue skies. Instead, today we have haze, murky seas, and to the north and south, miles and miles of flat, nondescript blah. Onshore winds buckle the scrambled surf. Blowing sand collects in pale drifts behind plastic containers — motor oil, soda, ice — embedded like bones left behind from another era.
And this: in the path of the rolling white water, a broad, shallow sandbar runs parallel to shore. At one end of the bar, a deep channel cuts through the surf, a clear course to the open sea. At the other end of the bar, another, less obvious channel has just begun to reveal itself as a streamlike current pouring in and out through the rolling wash. Inside the sandbar, then, between it and the beach, lies a deep, wave-free trough, a long cast wide, a quarter of a mile long, open at both ends for fish moving on the tide.
How good is that? I head toward the shallow channel to confirm an answer. Before passing the end of the trough and wading the wash to reach the sandbar, I take up a station that allows me to see beneath the ruffled surface and reflected light. There they are — a half dozen big corvinas slipping in and out of view. Not the typical two and three-pounders, but fish at least twice that size, a cluster of gray shadows riding the complex currents moving through the trough as water spills, in and out, at opposite ends from the action of both waves and the rising tide. I watch long enough to trace a rhythm in the movement of the fish: one moment they’re gone, eclipsed by surge that discolors the trough with a cloud of sand; the next, they’re nosed up to the mouth of the channel, the wrists of their caudal tails flexing gently in the current.
Now, that’s a cast I can make.
II
I lie awake, Madrina cocked so I can’t sleep. On a new anchorage, I failed to check our depth against the tide chart. Now we’re resting at low tide on the toe of a steep bank that mimics the pitch of a rooftop. Flashes of lightning fill the tent window; to the east, a single thunderhead climbs through the stars.
The lightning approaches. Flashes become splintered sticks, illuminating the slick surface of the far side of the bay. Thunder rolls; raindrops tap the taut canvas of the tent. The barometer, at least, remains steady. No wind. From my canted nest, I watch the storm creep north, sliding along the spine of the peninsula.
Too early for breakfast? I’m sure of this: at whatever hour, I can’t face another slab of halibut, even if it hasn’t festered during the warm, sticky night. Added to the challenges at Tres Bocas, the complex of wilderness surf-fishing spots along the northern panhandle of Magdalena Bay, is how to limit your take. Even alone, I like to slay an exceptional fish now and then, generally yet another sad case of my ego getting the best of me. Two days ago, after sighting the corvinas in the trough, I wandered out onto the sandbar and swung a fly through the deep channel leading into open sea. Few things give you the sense of a big predator like an oversized halibut hanging out at the intersection of conflicting currents. Color, configuration, and deceit make the halibut arguably the most dangerous creature in the Baja surf short of a big roosterfish or those marauding dolphins — at least until you swim a fly through its strike zone. Yet when I dressed out this one and ended up with four filets draped like laundry over Madrina’s boomkin, I sensed I’d gone, again, too far.
Daylight finally paints the passing thunderstorm into sharp relief. A black-crowned night heron stalks the shore above Madrina’s upraised bow. Mullet dimple the inshore current. The tide scales the steep bank. Beyond the dunes, a double rainbow scores the cloudsmeared sky.
Las ánimas: the spirits, ghosts, the like. Last time I was here, I was too frightened to fish in earnest, worried about passage through the wave-tangled boca and sailing south in the open ocean to Santo Domingo and beyond. This time, I’m confident I can sail through the surf, head either north to San Gregorio and even San Juanico or back to the bocas to the south.
And whack some good fish before I leave.
The setup is this: waves marching through the boca break rank and run along the sand; the vigorous shore break spreads caramel-colored whorls through the emerald slot carrying current parallel to shore. Bonefish nose up into the roiled water left behind by the collapsing waves. Or maybe they’re gliding, just off the bottom, back and forth along the bank as if underwater pelicans skimming beneath the waves.
Nobody’s quite sure what’s up with Mag Bay bonefish. Fishing for them is nothing like the sport known elsewhere, casting to fish glimpsed through sparkling tropical waters. And the fish are small — anything over three pounds is exceptional, or a lie. But flyrodders have been matching gear to their prey for a long, long time. Bonefish are bonefish, and most everyone knows the sheepish embarrassment one can feel after landing a piddling bone that made your 9-weight ache, your drag squeal. Fish these Baja bones with a 5-weight or 6-weight and be prepared for sport as good as it gets — the kind of fun many of us seem to have left behind since deciding to get serious about our game.
I’ve got a fly I picked up from Peter Koga in California, a modified Crazy Charlie that suggests the ubiquitous bay shrimp common in West Coast estuaries. In my second year fishing for Mag Bay bonefish, I don’t think patterns matter all that much. I make casts up along shore into waves spiraling toward me; I try to get the fly to slide off the toe of the beach, into the trough and down into the unseen flight paths of feeding bones. As often as not, it works — or, more accurately, the fly fools something: toritos, palometas, cocineros, corvinas, cabrillas.
All of these fish are strong fighters. The reason I rarely fish for Mag Bay bones with a 5-weight or 6-weight is the number of fish that can turn light stuff inside out. A 7-weight or 8-weight makes a lot more sense, and even then, you’ll wonder, at times, if you’ve got enough stick in your hands.
I fish through the top of the tide. Things slow down until the surface of the trough shudders under the first tentative breaths of the onshore breeze. Between sets, I begin to feel the gentle pull of current into the boca; up the beach, Madrina pivots on her buoy. The next corvina I land is the smaller, schooling size you often find in bunches. As I slide it up on the sand, it disgorges several bay shrimp, still alive, wriggling, not much different from the fly hooked inside the fish’s toothy mouth. I move to the “upstream” end of the beach and begin making casts exactly as if I were swinging an unweighted nymph down to a pod of trout feeding on caddis pupae struggling to the surface. I know we all have better things we should be doing with our lives, but now and then this kind of sport must be good for us, or else it wouldn’t be such a delight.
The fish don’t stand a chance.
III
The great challenge of surf fishing, of course, is that you stand at the edge of the sea, casting into a miniscule patch of water, hoping to connect with wild animals that can travel, if only theoretically, to the far ends of the earth. Your advantage, if you can call it that, is that fish frequent such habitat for a host of reasons, not the least of which has to do with their need to secure food while at the same time avoid the same fate as the fish and what all on which they themselves feed. Limited by the depth one can wade and the length of a cast, surf fishers become inveterate wayfarers, seeking to discover microlocations too precise to find by anglers reliant on such broadsweep recon tools as roads, boats, or even Google Earth.
Bocas help. It takes little imagination to picture tidal currents, running in and out of a mangrove-lined bay, flush with fish. Yet the scale of the bocas in the northern Magdalena Bay panhandle create shorelines that become, in their own right, long beaches that need an angler’s time and patience — and a willingness to roam — to uncover those sweet spots so rare on a surf fisher’s beat.
Without such spots, setting out to fish a Mag Bay boca is akin to saying you’re headed to the forest to hunt: a sound place to start, but in no way a strategy that guarantees success. Which is to say no more than that wild game is rarely easy to find and that the challenge of hunting is, at its best, the hunt itself.
My first two clients at Tres Bocas are Roman and Roman, father and son. They lack much in the way of saltwater experience. I figure we’ll head to Soledad, where the fish seem especially plentiful, more so this year since local pangeros were forced to stop fishing commercially in a government attempt to protect egg-laying sea turtles.
I organize a ride out to the boca with one of the idle pangeros. When I sailed into López Mateos the previous afternoon, following a month exploring the southern reaches of the bay, Bob Hoyt of Mag Bay Outfitters had hollered at me from the end of the little concrete pier where he keeps a pair of big-game cruisers that I needed to pull Madrina. Hurricane Javier, just south of Cabo San Lucas, was headed our way.
Still, we have a small window, and Roman and Roman are eager to try out the kind of surf fishing Bob has told them I’ve sussed out the past two seasons, at least until the storm passes, when they can make for the big-game banks on the open sea. The ride to the boca takes but minutes, in shocking contrast to the time Madrina and I usually need to cover the same water. I tell Niñon, our pangero, the tallest Mexican I’ve ever known, that he doesn’t need to hang around while we fish from the beach. Approaching the boca, I also suggest he swing into the little cove inside the point, the protected water where Madrina and I anchored the previous night. On his feet at the center console, Niñon spins the wheel, toylike in hands the size of small terriers, then looks over at me as if I just told him on what side of the bay we can expect to see the sunrise.
I’m trying to be the guide. We rest our gear against a coil of driftwood, and the two Romans hurry off to inspect an upended turtle carapace yawning at us from across the sand. I know this kind of find should be enough; Roman the father, a freckled and furry woodworker from San Diego, has brought along storebought water and snack bars, the sensible trappings of an experienced fan of the outdoors. Roman the son, fair as a chickpea, despite a one-day glow from the Baja sun, lives with his mother, Dad’s ex-wife, in France; he attends a teachers’ college near Paris, a setting that strikes me as different from this empty beach as it is from a Kansas shopping mall. Still, we’re here to fish. But when I suggest we string up the fly rods, both Romans protest. Despite experience catching small trout in the Sierra, neither of them wants to try his hand, right off the bat, at fly fishing in the surf.
Fine. What do I know? While the two Romans assemble their spinning gear, I pick through a box of Dad’s lures: Rapalas, Little Cleos, Mister Twister Sassy Shads. I figure they’re bound to catch something, and once the edge is off, and if I can manage a couple of fish of my own, then I’ll get fly rods in their hands and the fun will really begin.
But as soon as we’re spread out along the beach and I fail to find fish with my first dozen casts, I begin to worry. No birds. Dark clouds to the south. Current and shore break resist the swimming fly. I fish harder and harder, spearing casts into the deep trough just beginning to flood the bay. Covering water like a searchlight, I push my way into heavier surf, working farther up the point, while the two Romans remain anchored to their spots, casting and retrieving as if serving shuttlecocks from beyond the end line.
Then I hook what feels like a bonefish — the startling pull followed by a disproportionate lack of weight. Both Romans come running. But when the fish slides up onto the sand, as homely as a smelt or spawning grunion, the Romans slow to a walk. My cool enthusiasm, voiced in a string of platitudes, does nothing to win the day. Roman senior seems especially underwhelmed. Now married to “a younger woman” from Thailand, he has let on, already, how much he looks forward to eating whatever he can’t filet for the freezer and take back to California.
My small bonefish looks like it might have as much meat on it as a brace of sea urchins.
“They’re called bonefish for a reason,” I explain, slipping this one back into the surf.
Its a long morning. Try as I might, I can’t get either Roman to pick up a fly rod — or find a fish. As the tide begins to push in earnest, sweeping past us at the speed of a valley river, I start getting bit — little jacks, schooling corvinas, more bones. Then — uh oh — something heavy grabs the fly and begins swimming upcurrent toward the open sea.
The surf fisher’s dream: the monster fish, one all but unimaginable from the point of view of an angler knee-deep in the wash. I set off up the beach, uncertain whether I should break into a run. I simply can’t stop this thing, despite pressure I would put on a big roosterfish — or a yellowfin tuna. Fifty yards up the point, I close in on Roman junior, who watches my approach while at the same time preparing to cast his silver spoon.
“Son,” I holler. “You need to get out of my way.”
At last, I turn it. A long stage of give-and-take carries us back to where we started. The two Romans look on, when suddenly I see it — the broad wingspan of a manta ray, soaring through the blue surge despite the hard line angling sharply from its creepy snout.
There’s nothing to do but land it, twist the fly free, and with a long stick of driftwood, nudge the beast back into the shore break. Later, Roman senior finally catches a little corvina; he chooses to kill it after I confirm that, yes, they are good to eat. By the time Niñon arrives, tangled clouds, dark as dawn, tumble overhead. The port captain, Martín Vidal, has joined Niñon, hoping we won’t mind if they run out into the middle of the boca to drop a hand line over the side for groupers. The commercial guys are still shut down. All we need is a little bait.
“We’ve got just the thing,” I say, my Spanish hitting the mark.
In English, I tell Roman to hand over his fish.
