Mag Bay Recap
Words: Michael Lettieri; Photos: Aaron Loomis, Michael Lettieri
The ride from Loreto to López Mateos takes just under two hours. Enough time to enjoy a few non-Tecate beers as we wind up, away from the gulf and through the mountains to the Pacific side of the Baja Peninsula. There is excited chatter in the van. The three of us, strangers until 15 minutes before, are also strangers to the place we're headed.
A friend once asked if I’d rather fish somewhere familiar, or somewhere new. I didn’t have a good answer. As the road ascends past blocky, broken cliffs and onto a vast plain where infinite cactus rest silhouetted against the fading sunset, the conversation turns to the Unknown. Will there be marlin? How far offshore? What about the weather? Fishing trips last a week, but the anticipation has built for months.
There is so much that is outside of our control and beyond what we can know. So we talk about what we can. The flies we will use, those deliberate materials gathered on a hook, insubstantial relative to the ocean but full of hope, each an act of hubris, an attempt to bend luck in our favor. Marlin are rumored to prefer pink. Dorado, blue. Roosterfish are inscrutable, but wary of flash. Stark black and white for tuna. Flies for everything that can we imagine awaits. We will choose them by what we see, what we hear, what the guides tell us. Tomorrow, we will pull them like talismans from well-traveled boxes, sending them into the unknown, each cast a question.
On the first morning, we head out for tuna. Daybreak is clear, the wispy marine haze melting under the gathering sun. Ricky angles the boat west, tracing the channel through the shoals, where, he tells me, a Mexican navy ship once ran aground and sank. The inlet is a no-man’s-land, severe and unwelcoming, reminding us that this is a wild place. And we are headed into the wilderness.
Out in open water, the boat runs over languid swells, and we search the surface for signs of life. I’m comfortable with this uncertainty, this expectation that somehow, in water that stretches endlessly around us, we will find the fish. Yet I also understand the insanity of the effort: these pelagic species travel enormous distances north and south, east and west, up and down, in constant movement. Tuna are made for this, hydrodynamic hunting machines that prowl at invisible depths, only to explode at the surface and disappear again. For an hour, we see nothing—no splashes, no birds—then Ricky spots the tail of a marlin, cruising at the surface. A rush of excitement, but it vanishes, and the teaser we troll behind the boat dances through seemingly empty water.
As we turn south something grabs the teaser and runs, the drag of the trolling reel buzzing, the best kind of alarm. When the teaser is hit again, Ricky kills the motor. “Atún.” It doesn’t take long, only two or three casts, before they find my black and white sardine fly, and I’m hooked up. These football-sized yellowfin vibrate with energy, stiff tails beating like wind-up toys, zipping through the water with a precise, lethal ferocity. And they keep coming for hours as we drift. Bigger yellowfin find our flies too, and relentless neon blue skipjack, and an unexpected dorado that wanders between the boats.
There are times when the sea and sky are mocking in its emptiness, and you wonder if it would have been better to fish the structure, to stay connected to shore. Today, though, it is easy to remember why we are drawn to the Bluewater and the possibility held within its vastness.
Mangroves
There is a snook, slipping into the shadow of the dead mangrove branch, in the pocket just off the bow of the panga. The boat drifts in the gusting wind, and I lose sight of the fish as I try to angle a cast back toward the roots. We are deep inside the mangrove channels north of López Mateos, tucked along the edge of a tiny bay, past a small oyster farm and an abandoned phosphate mining complex, throwing small clousers underneath the branches. It’s hot today, with tropical humidity. Mangrove weather.
Yesterday, we found bunches of snook along a different stretch of roots, darting out to grab our flies, a flash in the tannic water the only indication to set the hook. No snook have shown today, but several broomtail grouper have eaten with outsized aggressiveness. From the branches, a night heron watches us, curiously eyeing each cast. As the afternoon stretches on, the tide begins to rise, and though we spot fish, few eat. Then we find a school of spotted sand bass, eager orange-eyed marauders, that are deemed both cute and ugly.
Tomorrow, the morning will be chill, with thick fog and still air. In this dim light, drifting along the channel, a different experience. Throwing black and purple flies into the dark arches of roots, I come tight with a larger grouper that deeply bends my fiberglass rod, and a finescale triggerfish that pulls just as hard. A corvina attempts to eat a hooked sand bass, then finds my fly, silvery-blue headshakes breaking the glassy calm. It is a mean-looking fish, vampire fangs and yellowed eyes, but delicate, and I slip it back into the water quickly.
If the ocean outside the bay is open and infinite, the mangroves within feel like a labyrinth, countless miles of hidden channels and sudden drop-offs, holes and edges, inviting exploration, demanding one more cast.
