When our friend Jill was visiting us from Seattle in La Paz, she asked me a question that neither Harmony or I had thought to ask. This was among the many delights of having her come to visit. Others included sharing the city with her and sailing her out to a beautiful anchorage only to addict her to the card game that Harmony and I play on our i-Things during many of the empty moments. Sitting out in the cockpit with our third pot of coffee, Jill asked,
“What about this experience so far has surprised you the most?”
I had to give it some thought. We had just been nearing our six-month mark since leaving Portland last August. There have been many things that surprised me in all these foreign environments, but in my gut I knew which one it was.
“I never thought I would enjoy fishing so much.”
The beard eventually had to go to accommodate snorkeling, but the hair is still running wild. Sorry Rex.
Growing up, fishing meant being woken up when it was still deeply dark outside, forced into thick and heavy long johns, coats, and waders to prevent the cold and the wet – unsuccessfully, to great tragedy and discomfort – and poured into our big old brown truck for a drive to some foreign lake or river. There was usually still fog on the water by the time we slid off the dock.
Fishing meant spending an exhausting day being cold, wet, smelly, bored,
and having to pee in a coffee can with everyone just, around. The
limitless amounts of whatever junk food I could imagine to crave were
the only lure that made it bearable. I have little doubt that I
complained frequently and creatively. Fishing was a personal favor that I
did for my Dad. Such is life, and reportedly the joy that is children.
Fishing had such a boring and uncomfortable attachment from my
childhood, I was skeptical that being in Baja California Sur, on a
sailboat with my wife would change that.
Fishing here took some adjustment. All successful fishing expeditions begin with the tackle box. My slim supply of fishing implements consisted of the following:
- Dozens of rusty trolling lures retrieved snorkeling on the shores of Detroit Lake every year since my Dad was a child
- Rubber grubworms and lead weights from the time my friend Robbie and I took the sailboat out on the Columbia on a stormy Memorial Day (or was it still in March?) to fish for salmon on a day that we later learned had been about six days before the salmon had reached that particular stretch of the river, perhaps explaining why we were one of about four boats out there and illustrating the role that reliable intelligence plays in successful fishing.
- Power Bait at least ten years old, probably from some trip to one of the more convenient lakes in Oregon to just slum it and try to nab some trout.
- A jar of Great Balls of Fire that I’ve owned probably since Suttle Lake.
- Four bobbers of varying designs, if that would help. Though I wasn’t sure I remembered how to use them.
It is perhaps not a shocking surprise to you like it was to me that my imported arsenal from Oregon lakes and rivers did not produce results, immediate or otherwise. It is fortunate, then, that Harmony and I met Ivan and Shelly at Bahia Los Frailes. We were halfway through a four mile walk to town on a hot and dusty road when up from behind us bounced a dust cloud containing red-faced, smiling Ivan in a beat up Suzuki Sidekick that had clearly been a long-time resident of Baja. Him being a successful local fisherman (what else do you call a person who has spent every winter here for twenty years?), and me being very interested in successful local fishing, we got to talking.
When I told him that we did not fish at all when we sailed down the Pacific side of Baja because I had failed to buy hooks of a sufficient size, I thought that he would cry. After Shelly fed us fantastic fish quesadillas, but before she gave us a jar of delicious cherry jam, Ivan pulled me aside, rummaged through his collection of complicated fishing rigs, and sealed several in a plastic bag that he passed into my hands like a king knighting a squire. This would be the beginning of my education.
I have no accounting of the number of hours I have spent these past months in solitary apprenticeship to the ancient art of fishing. I jig. I sit rigid as a monk. To shake it up, I try holding the pole off the rocking boat still as a branch on a windless day, devoting all my muscles to the effort. I dance the pole over the water like it’s the stupid little squid I’m trying to imitate, though it’s hard to imagine what motivates a little squid that’s new in the neighborhood.
With time, science enters the effort. Reel the line deep. Reel it shallow. Reel it all depths in between in precise increments. Change lure variables – bait or no bait, varying weights, different flashers and janglers and flies and fake rubber sea life – with the deliberateness of engineering designs, behavioral studies, and eventually slot machine pulls.
In the final stage comes the geological, ecological, political, historical, and biochemical theories to explain why this particular anchorage was unfit for marine life to begin with so there probably just weren’t any fish in there to catch anyway. It is generally best if psychological theories remain absent from this phase of the process.
Routinely I write guaranteed fishing strategies in my head, ready to publish for the world to see just as soon as they prove effective at catching a fish. You may have noticed that no such instructions have appeared as yet.
You take an unreasonable dislike of nibblers, puffer fish most of all. Puffers are like spiny tear-shaped puppy dogs that slice through your bait like surgeons until there is only a clean hook. Even if you were to catch one, causing his two little fins to flutter like little mechanical wings as you get him into the boat – him puffing up into a perfect ball of long spikes, wheezing and grunting with the effort in an adorable attempt to look tough – you can’t eat it because it might poison you until you die horribly. They are in just about every anchorage I’ve tried to fish so far, dozens clustering around my lure like groupies around a rock star, preventing the larger and more edible fish from coming up to meet it, maybe get an autograph.
Nearly all the fish I’ve caught so far have been accidental, so designated because they occurred in situations that had nearly entirely taken human contribution out of the equation. Imagine you’ve snarled your reel in a big tangled hairdo of invisible line, with about 45 feet already out in about 18 feet of water. As you’re getting close to finally teasing apart the knot after minutes of effort, something big swallows your bait, hooks himself, and takes off. Can this success be attributed to the skill of the casting?
Other times I have been literally absent on the scene. The boat essentially caught the skipjack tuna between Muertos and La Paz by sailing past with a lure swimming off the back. The fish I caught while we were anchored behind the enormous sea cave-strewn rock in an anchorage called La Ballena (the whale, and there was truth in advertising) caught himself on my dangling lure while we were eating dinner and wore himself out trying to get away. On this catch, however, I had concocted a secret ingredient to the standard hoochie (little rubber squid) that everyone recommends around these parts. I’d like to see it give me more success before I think about opening it up to the pity of any true fishermen.
Fishing success has been about as abundant in Baja as it was back in Oregon growing up. So why is it that it was the gut answer to Jill’s question, before there was even time to mull it over?
Maybe it’s the peace and freedom of thought that accompanies the beauty of the scene, be it majestic striated mountains, sideways rain, or the deepest dark in a still and silent cove behind a towering rock that can be felt in the weight of the air though it remains unseen.
Maybe it’s the relative warmth and associated comfort that accompanies our present latitude.
Maybe it’s lingering curiosity about the myth of Baja as the Eden of fishing (as yet not verified).
Maybe it’s the thought that catching a fish means providing the centerpiece of that night’s dinner and thus qualifies as a day’s work.
Maybe it’s that I don’t have to pee in a can.
One of my greatest intellectual accomplishments on this trip was for my brain to convince my body that this is comfortable.
Many evenings I stand on the back of the boat and lean against the wire backstay with the latest theory dangling off the end of my pole, and I think of how this all started with my Dad long ago. We fished for salmon with my grandpa on the Alsea in a 12-foot aluminum
boat, pushed by a 5-horse putt-putt motor and dragging coffee cans or
five gallon buckets to slow us down, inhaling gasoline exhaust while
slewing between other little skiffs through a beaded curtain of drizzle.
I don’t remember catching any fish.
We camped up at Suttle Lake
in May in the brisk, bright cold, bounced and splashed on our little
brown tri-hull “speed boat” that had luxury bow seats for the kids and
drove like an overpowered raft. Striking out, we drove through a light
snow on a wet highway pass in the Cascades on our way to a more “sure
thing” lake someplace I’d never heard of then or since. This was when
that old brown truck became the heavy highway guard in the opposite lane
of a girl whose Honda was on its way sideways toward a cliff in one of
the most fortunate vehicle accidents in the world. You don’t get too
many of those. I don’t remember catching any fish.
Then there
were the mornings when we’d get in the truck with my uncle and head off
to the back country of Linn County, through the main drags of what was
at the time the logging town of Lebanon, the even more deeply committed
logging town that was Sweet Home, and off the highway to either Foster
Lake or Green Peter. I don’t remember catching any fish, but even at my
age I could tell these trips weren’t about that. The purpose of these
trips was to sit in the middle seat of that truck.
Sometimes we’d
go even deeper, to other counties and past places like Brothers
(population: 3), Lyons (pop.: ?), Shedd (no joke) and the tri-cities of
Mill City, Idanha, and Detroit. I don’t remember catching any fish, but I
do remember sort of almost how to get around to some of these places.
The
first time I drank coffee was on a fishing trip. So was the first time I
was up before the sun, or really experienced rain (genuine
accept-no-substitutes Oregon rain), or killed something that was
undeniably alive. I’m certain that the first time I caught a fish had to
be on a fishing trip, though I couldn’t even begin to tell you when or
what it was.
One side effect of those fishing trips was that I
learned how to crew on a boat. Because we caught so few fish, it may
have technically been the primary effect. It made it possible for me to know in the
silghtest way what I’m supposed to do with my boat.** Now that I have a
boat of my own I’m passing my knowledge along to Harmony much like my
Dad taught me. All the gadgets and whiz-bangs and dealibobbers and
doohickuses to futz with, all the dernits and dagnabbits to avoid; a
good crewman never lets you down. She appreciates it, on most days. See
we have this whole, “We’re both the captain” thing going on and, well I
don’t want to bore you all with all the details of that.
—————-
On a related note, today is my father’s birthday, who just turned fifty-{hrmhmhr}. Go get ’em, Dad.
**I’d be remiss if I did not also thank Dave White and Ira, who taught Harmony and I how to wrangle such a big sailboat!