An Involuntary Change of Pace

I like running boats, and boats themselves, about as much as I like fishing, which is a lot. My girlfriend of five years, though, doesn’t like them even a little bit. She has no sense of their prettiness nor their unique personalities nor of the promise of mystery and adventure they represent, and besides, she gets seasick just about every time we leave the harbor, which could well explain the rest of her feelings.

But she does like fishing, quite possibly more than I do, and she couldn’t care less what for. Bluegill or bluefin — it’s all the same to her, as long as she’s not puking and as long as she catches a fish every half hour or so. On the other hand — and I hate to admit this — I’ve been caring less and less these days about actually catching fish, as long as I’m behind the wheel of a boat on the ocean and as long as someone onboard is catching them. Catching fish myself has become the proverbial icing the cake.

Obviously, this creates some friction. I simply can’t see leaving a perfectly good boat sitting on the trailer in the driveway to go fish from shore, or a pier, or whatever. In fact, I can’t see leaving a perfectly good boat sitting on the trailer in the driveway to go do much of anything except perhaps things that are absolutely necessary to satisfy the basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing.

And Amber can’t see spending an hour packing and launching, 50 or 100 bucks on fuel, and then another hour washing down and unpacking just to get out on the boat, no matter what the weather, no matter how much or little time we have, and no matter the likelihood of actually catching anything. When she goes fishing, she wants to catch fish, and if the boat is the best means to that end, then fine. Beyond that, she sees no reason to bother with it.

But with the limited amount of shared leisure time available to a young couple — neither of whom works in a particularly lucrative field — renting in Southern California while paying off cars and student loans, you have to compromise — and like it. Which is why I found myself crossing the border into Tijuana on a Friday afternoon in mid-August with a few rods, a box of plastics and leadheads, a pack of size-8 hooks for sand crabs, and a few swivels and weights, but no boat.

* * *

The idea was to spend the weekend somewhere on the Baja coast, wasting time on the beach, eating tacos, exploring the dirt roads, perhaps drinking a bit of beer here and there, and, of course, fishing, although I was made to agree ahead of time that this was not a fishing trip to Baja, but rather a trip to Baja during which we would probably spend some time fishing.

I was compromising for all I was worth, although I certainly didn’t expect to like it. It would have sounded like a nice weekend under different circumstances, but the 238/295 area had been ripe all week with big albies, yellows were swarming under the paddies, and the yellowfin and dorado had just begun to show. How she could prefer sitting on some beach reading a book to trailering down to the Coral and making day runs to the banks escaped me completely. But she assured me — several times and in no uncertain terms — that this was indeed the case.

In the end, the trip turned out different than either of us had expected or planned. We hit Ensenada around sundown and decided to keep rolling south. Neither of us wanted to stay in the city, but we had no camping gear, and I was fairly sure there were no hotels along the road to La Bufadora. I figured we could stay the night at the El Palomar in Santo Tomás and then head out in the morning to La Bocana and Puerto Santo Tomás on the coast. We decided to skip dinner in Ensenada in order to get to Santo Tomás sooner and have a better chance of getting a room.

But the El Palomar wouldn’t let our dogs in. It was 9:00, full-dark, and we were hungry and had nowhere to sleep. The reasonable thing to do would have been to turn around and go back to Ensenada. But reasonable isn’t my forte, and back-tracking isn’t something I do very much. So I made an executive decision to head on out the 18 miles of dirt to La Bocana, where neither of us had ever been, but where I was pretty sure I’d read there was a hotel of some kind. Dinner in Santo Tomás first? Nope, I wanted to get out there before everybody was asleep, because if we didn’t we’d be sleeping in the truck seats or driving 18 more miles of dirt back to the highway and then up to Ensenada.

We did get there in time — just barely — and caught the owner of the little resort at Puerto Santo Tomás fiddling with something in the pumphouse with a flashlight just before turning in. All his cabins were full, he said, but he could put us up in a house nearby for 50 bucks a night. Standing there in the pitch dark, almost shivering from the night wind off the Pacific, with a tired, hungry, grouchy girlfriend — who’d just revealed that she thought we should have gone back to Ensenada instead — glaring at me in the glow of the panel lights, I thought that was about the best news I’d heard all day.

He scrounged up a bundle of firewood, tossed it in the back of my truck, and led us back over the washboard track we’d come in on to an isolated little house a mile south of the resort on a bluff overlooking the bay. We ate some chips and dip for dinner and Little Debbies for dessert, had a couple of beers on the porch, and crashed.

* * *

I was wide-awake at 5:30, excited as ever to check out a place I’d pulled into at night and seen only in the dark. I stuffed my pockets full of Fish Traps, grabbed my baitcaster, and scrambled down the bluff to the flat top of a big sandstone outcrop 10 feet above the water. There were promising-looking boilers all around, patches of heavy kelp, birds working just beyond casting range. Across the bay, the local fleet of bright-green pangas rode on their moorings, lit by the first rays of sun over the ridge to the east.

On perhaps my fifth cast I hooked the largest lingcod I’ve ever caught — which isn’t saying much; it might have gone eight pounds — and then predictably broke it off trying to lift it up to where I stood. In the next hour and a half, I caught maybe a dozen smaller lings, eight or 10 little generic rockfish, three Johnny bass, and three not-very-big calicos. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a particularly productive morning of fishing. But, at the same time, it was immensely enjoyable in a way I’d almost forgotten fishing could be.

The kind of fishing we saltwater guys (and gals) do doesn’t have much in common with the kind of fishing most of the country does — the kind that accounts, in large part, for the fact that fishing is the single most popular recreational activity in the U.S. Our fishing — especially offshore — is dynamic and fast-paced and, if you’re the skipper, fairly complex in the sense that you have to monitor and process a zillion different factors to be successful: water temp and quality, sonar returns, bird activity and other visual clues, boat position and speed, radio traffic, other vessels in the area, tide and current states, bait situation, fuel level, marine weather and sea-state, and so on and so on and so on.

Consider, for the sake of comparison, fishing for catfish in a farm pond. You toss your nightcrawler or chicken liver or dough-ball or live goldfish (a favorite catfish bait in Arkansas, where I went to graduate school) out there, and you may or may not get a bite, but if you don’t, you can pretty much assume they’re just not biting. They haven’t followed a warm-water current 50 miles north since yesterday, they certainly haven’t gorged themselves on red crabs overnight, and odds are they haven’t gotten suddenly line-shy either. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but the fact remains that skippering a boat in search of saltwater gamefish on the Pacific is vastly more complicated and uncertain a pursuit than the kind of fishing most of the country does.

Even on sportboats, where you don’t have to worry about finding the fish or managing the boat, saltwater fishing is highly dynamic. When the trollers get bit, you’d better get to the tank, pin on a bait, and get it in the water right now, because those tuna move fast and far, and if you dawdle, you may well miss your only chance of the stop — or the day. Inshore fishing, of course, isn’t quite so fast-paced, but even flylining sardines for barracuda or dragging ‘chovies on the bottom for sand bass requires a lot more activity and engagement than casting a spinner over and over until a trout swims by and bites it — let alone sitting and waiting for a catfish to eat your dough-ball and ring the little bell clipped to your line.

* * *

At 7:30, I headed back up the bluff, and we drove up to the resort for chorizo and eggs, which tasted even better than usual at that point. As we were leaving, we asked what time they were serving lunch. They weren’t. How about dinner? No, they didn’t think so. This was bad news; we had about a half a bag of Ruffles left, three Swiss Cake Rolls, a bit of jerky, and probably a gallon and a half of water. But a few miles back, at La Bocana, we’d passed a big camping area with a dozen tents, which had to mean there was a taco stand nearby.

Confident we’d find something to eat later, we drove north over the ridge separating Puerto Santa Tomás from Bahiá Soledad, where wild, empty coast stretched on for miles toward Punta Banda. We caught more calicos and lings from the rocks and then spent a good hour poking around like third-graders in the richest tidepools I’ve seen in years, while the dogs, who refused to stay behind, learned by experience that pretty much all tidepool animals either sting, pinch, bite, or poke.

In the early afternoon, we returned to La Bocana. There was a little cinderblock store painted in Tecate colors, but it was emphatically closed. And the general rule that in Baja there’s at least one taco stand anywhere 10 or more people live and another one for every 100 people after that did not hold true there. I had no fillet knife, no seasonings, and no cooking gear, but it was becoming all too clear that if we wanted to eat dinner we were either going to have to drive 36 round-trip miles on that horrid washboard, or else catch it ourselves.

So we tied sliding-sinker rigs and little light-wire hooks onto a couple of ultralight spinning outfits and headed for the beach, which turned out to be loaded with quarter-sized sand crabs. I was still filling a plastic cup with them when I heard Amber holler from 20 yards down the beach and looked up to see her side-stepping through the suds with a bent rod. A minute later, she dragged a fat little surfperch up onto the sand.

For the next hour and a half, we caught surfperch hand-over-fist, several of them bigger than I’d ever seen, and broke off what I’m certain was a corbina as well as something heavy that I’d like to think was a halibut but probably was a guitarfish. And although the final tally was even less impressive than that morning’s, the simple pleasure of the fishing was greater still, mainly because it was shared.

We hooted and hollered and competed for the biggest and the most fish (Amber won hands-down in both categories), and every time I felt that unmistakable, electric thump of a bite, reeled down, set up, and bent my little trout rod against the vital throb of fish and water, a bit more of that basic, fundamental joy I’d almost forgotten of waiting for a bite and getting it, of momentary connection with such a strange, beautiful, magical thing as a fish, came back to me.

* * *

Eventually, the rising tide and building surf seemed to shut down the bite, and we hauled our Mexican limits of perch back across the sand, bundled in a wet towel, to the truck, the worn-out dogs stepping on our heels. Unexpectedly, the store was open, and we replenished our supplies of beer and water and bought some garlic salt and a can of off-brand refried beans.

Some folks who had temporary work irrigating and picking squash, cucumbers, and chiles at the ranchos up the valley were there, catching crawfish from the muddy lagoon behind the beach for their Sunday-night caldo with pieces of a yellowtail carcass they’d gotten from a local panguero tied to a few feet of scavenged monofilament. They already had a gallon water jug almost filled with little tidepool crabs for the stew. We sat for an hour with them drinking beer and talking things over and gave them all but three of our surfperch, which they called chopa, before heading back up to our rented house.

I did my best to fillet our perch with a Leatherman, sprinkled the fillets with garlic salt, and tossed them over a little hardwood cookfire on an old grill we’d found beside the house, nestling our can of beans down in the coals. The way things taste is so heavily influenced by how hungry we are, our state of mind, and, of course, how much alcohol is in our systems that it’s impossible to say if those little perch fillets eaten by hand like chicken strips truly tasted like the finest thing the ocean has to offer, but at the time they seemed to, and that’s really all that matters. The beans were iffy at best, which might help the case for the perch being genuinely tasty.

* * *

So, in the wake, so to speak, of this involuntary but enlightening change of pace, am I going to give up chasing tuna and ‘tails and spend my weekends sitting on the bank of someone’s farm pond waiting for a bluegill to pull my bobber under? Not a chance. After all, it was the dynamic nature of saltwater fishing, its similarity to hunting more than to most freshwater fishing, its deep ties to boating and boats and the fascinating gadgetry they carry, the wildness and unpredictability of the sea and the inherent danger of venturing out on it that drew me in so completely and inexorably in the first place after a childhood and early adult-hood of exclusively freshwater fishing.

But I do have a newfound — or, more accurately, rediscovered — appreciation for the most basic and elemental pleasures of fishing: hooking, fighting, and landing fish. After so much time spent behind the wheel with other anglers on board depending on my judgement, so many hundreds of hours looking for the right color water or the right temp break while scanning the horizon for birds or paddies or jumpers or any other sign, so many attempts to set up the perfect drift or get the anchor down in exactly the right place, so many tough calls on whether to sit and wait or run and gun, switch out the trollers or keep dragging with the old reliables, chase radio fish or stick to the game-plan, I’d finally reached a point at which the sense of accomplishment that came with simply putting fish on the boat was about all I got or expected from fishing.

Once I’d found them and gotten them to bite, hooking and fighting and landing them wasn’t exactly a chore, but it certainly wasn’t the pleasure it should be. Instead, it was simply satisfying, like writing the last sentence of something you’ve worked on for five nights in a row or hammering the last nail into a deck that’s taken two weeks to build. That’s not how it should be, and I have Amber to thank for re-acquainting me with the simple joy she’s found in fishing all along.