Some
of Baja’s best fly fishing can be done on foot, sneaking around on the swinging
tide in the mangrove estuaries of Baja California. The Baja estero don’t
give up their treasures easily; down in Southern Baja, you’ve got to work for
your fun. The primary obstacle is distance. There are no major airports close
enough to make flying a better option. So you’re faced with a fifteen hundred
mile round trip on Baja’s notorious Mex 1 highway. Driving here is a
special experience. The roadway contains Grand Canyon sized potholes, wandering
cattle and lane barging semi trucks. All of this can make a six-hour drive day
feel like four weeks in a pressure cooker.
The fishing, however, makes it completely
worthwhile. On our best days we are following the tide as it makes its drop to
dead low. Since you’re in a closed system, the entirety of the estuary’s water
has to catch up to gravity’s pull by squeezing through narrow channels and
cuts. This forces the water to do some crazy things, currents are magnified,
and the whole place can go from brimming with water to walkable mudflat in an
hour. That’s why, if you’re going to take advantage of the best fishing, you’ve
got to be ready to walk as soon as you the mudflats are navigable.
Walking on the floor of the estuary is an odd experience. When I first saw the mudflats I assumed I’d sink if I walked out onto them. I imagined my flip-flop would get sucked off somewhere down in the anoxic, sulfurous, muck. I was completely wrong. The mudflats we walk across are firm, the sediment is most often grainy, clean and peppered with partially buried scallops, squirting clams and bits and pieces of algae. In the deeper pools you’ll see small sculpin and other baitfish zipping around, there are rays gliding in some of them and moon snails laying smooth whorls of eggs on the sand. The walk is a pleasant experience, there are all kinds of living, wiggling things out there, you never know what you’re going to see.
On a typical excursion we’re forced to wade
across shallow stream-like arteries that drain semi-submerged mudflats into
larger, flowing arms of the estuary. These are like rivers, they eventually
come together at the mouth of the estuary and empty out into the sea. All of
these waters are fishable. Undoubtedly we’ve missed opportunities on great
looking spots that probably hold halibut or corbina. We’re looking for
something else. We walk until we reach the larger channels that are fringed
with thick mangroves – and then we start hunting.
The best spots combine the cover of mangroves
with nearby deep water. In these holes, tucked up into the gnarled aquatic root
matrix of the mangroves are some of the most violent three to five pound fish
you will likely encounter. In the mangroves, the grouper is the king.
Well, these are baby broom tail grouper (the
adults leave the estuary and become monsters in the hundreds of pounds range)
and they’re not exactly regal, they are more like little donkeys; stubborn,
unnaturally strong, prone to ridiculous behavior and in the end strangely
loveable. A typical grouper hook up starts with a gut-punch strike that will
more than likely cause you to involuntarily vocalize. Common utterances range
from the semi-religious to the vulgar. My brother makes a noise that’s a cross
between an unintelligible word (it might be in English but I’m not certain) and
the noise you make when you’re working through a night of food poisoning. The
strike is more of a vicious yank then a slow building pressure; grouper aren’t
subtle, they’re pissed off.
You must immediately turn a grouper, if you
don’t you will be taken into the mangroves and your twenty pound fluorocarbon
leader will snap like a fresh snow pea. The best technique for bringing one around
is the ol’ clamp and crank: CLAMP down on your fly line like a Wilton on steroids.
In fact, clamp so hard that it kind of feels like you’re doing something wrong.
Next, put your rod sideways and CRANK it
until it bends into the most ugly arc you’ve ever seen. That’s the kind of
pressure you need to put on these fish. I’ve got a particular rod that I like
for fishing grouper it’s a discontinued TFO model called a Mini-Mag. It’s only
eight feet long and it’s half glass and half carbon fiber, it’s more like a
winch then it is a fly rod, perfect for dragging grouper out of the mangroves. If
you can put enough pressure on the fish, it may make one more run but as soon
as it gets its head up into clean water it will do the strangest thing. It will
give up. That’s how it is with grouper if you can break their will in the first
few minutes, the game is over.
Of course this kind of fishing never gets old
and before you know it, the sun has dipped down over the sea. The light is
fading and it’s time to beat the tide, it’s turned and is flooding back as
quickly as it had drained. Most of the time you’ve landed and released twenty
or thirty grouper and a handful of other game fish. You’re tired, your
stripping hand is cut and raw and the thought of a campfire, some SPAM and eggs
and a cold Pacifico sounds pretty nice. Baja
is simple and good, and most of it can be reached by foot, creeping through the
mangroves- searching for the king.
