Trip to Baja East Cape

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My son graduated with his master's from Ohio State in early May (70,000+ at a graduation ceremony!), and so I thought that would be a great excuse to take him for a few days of fishing to Baja. I had been to Rancho Leonero on the East Cape about 10 years ago, and both the accommodations and the fishing were great then, so I decided to give it a go again. I thought it would be nice to bring my brother along too, so we had to go in late May to accommodate his schedule. Past fishing reports from late-May to early-June showed that the warm water and pelagic fish had usually returned by then, but in some years the water had not quite warmed up enough for tuna and dorado. This looked promising enough, so we decided on the week of Memorial Day and made our reservations and travel plans.

On Memorial Day my son and I flew to Cabo from San Francisco and my brother flew down from San Diego...both very convenient flights arriving in the early afternoon. At SFO we had no problems checking 4 reels in one bag and 4 rods in a PVC tube, and carrying on a couple of travel rods and unspooled spinning reels. We were careful to not have more than 4 of either in one bag since we had heard that the Mexican customs officers would charge duty on any more than 4 carried by one person. Sure enough when we got there they were very interested in knowing who was carrying on the extra two rods and reels, and we made sure that it wasn't the same one of us that checked the fishing gear. I was shocked when we got to the immigration queue in the Cabo airport. There must have been about 500 of us waiting in line for 6 immigration officers. It took over an hour to get through the line!

We waited another hour for my brother's flight to arrive and for him to get through the (much shorter) immigration line. We had arranged a van to take us to the Rancho, and we found the driver and had an uneventful 45 minute drive to the resort. We got checked in, settled into our room, rigged up our rods and reels, and then settled down to the more important matters of beer, nachos, and ceviche! We then had a nice dinner with more beer and went off to hit the hay.

The next morning we had a quick breakfast at 6am and then trundled with our gear down the beach 50 yards to our awaiting panga. There was no live bait available so we bought a couple of big bags of Humboldt squid chunks and headed south past the lighthouse to where they had been catching a lot of 5-50lb tuna for the past couple of weeks. Once at the fishing grounds we worked the area all around, top to bottom, for 4 hours without a sniff of a tuna. I think we saw only one tuna boated by the other 10 or so boats there during the morning, so we decided to go offshore a ways to troll for dorado and/or marlin with only a couple of pompano to show for our morning. We trolled offshore for two hours with no luck, so we brought in the offshore gear and decided to work our way back inshore and to the north dragging rapalas. Finally we found a formula for catching fish, but not the good-eating pelagic ones. We ended up boating a couple of skipjack, a couple of jack crevalles, and a big sierra mackerel over the next couple of hours as we worked our way back to the resort. We kept only the sierra mackerel, and it made delicious ceviche and filets that night for dinner.

Over the next three days of fishing we went back to the tuna hole each day for a while, but only caught pompano there (and a sea snake, trumpet fish, and puffer fish). We also fished with caballitos one day when we could get them, with no luck either fly-lining or slow-trolling. We tried for marlin once more and got a single short strike by a small striper (saw it at the surface) but otherwise no love. One day we went 8 miles offshore to a school of porpoise and trolled cedar plugs and hoochies. We saw maybe a dozen football tuna caught by other boats, but we never got a bite. I tell you, our older panga skipper was p*ssed off at the world as he watched others stopping with hookups while we continued on our troll! I heard him saying something over and over on the radio, and it was almost an hour until I recognized it as the MF word! Each day we made sure to spend a few minutes fishing inshore until we had a few trigger fish for ceviche that night, and each day we went back to fishing rapalas for the jack crevalle and skipjack, catching a handful each day. On the last day we hooked our only dorado while we were trolling the rapalas. That would be the only edible pelagic fish we caught. The sea surface temperatures had dropped from 80F the previous week down to around 75-76F and so the warm water fish just weren't around in numbers. We still had a great time. The weather was beautiful, the beer was cold, the company was good, and we had fun pulling on the fish that we did catch.

The day after our last day of fishing we had a leisurely breakfast, broke down and packed our gear, packed up our meager filets, and took our van ride to the airport. When we got to the airport we decided to hire a porter to help us carry our gear. He picked up our bags at the curb and ushered us inside. After about 5 minutes I realized that he hadn't gotten my travel rods in their short tube, so I headed back to the curb to see if they were still there. And of course they were still there, along with the three security guards with bomb-sniffer apparatus! When I let them know it was mine, they finished their bomb-sniffing and led me upstairs to sign some papers before releasing the rod tube to me. They were actually quite nice about the abandoned package, but they obviously took it very seriously! The airport was much more efficient for our departure than for our arrival. Within 15 minutes we were checked in and ready to head through security to our gates. Only this time I was not permitted to bring the travel rods on as a carry-on. The security officer wouldn't say a word to me. She just pointed to a picture of a fishing rod on their "no carry" card and pointed for me to take it back downstairs to check-in. I obeyed and checked it in (no extra charge) and made my way back through security with no waiting at all.  The flight and drive home afterward were uneventful, and we had trigger fish ceviche and pompano filets for dinner a couple of nights after we got home!

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More photos.

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And a few more.

[David Hall]

sounds like it was a fine time had by all.  how can you go wrong with a trip like this anyway.  thanks for sharing this I enjoyed it very much.

[Hardy Boy]

Rich: I had the exact same fishing last time I was there in May last year. Tried hard but little reward ................. unlike the fishing reports being posted on the web !!! Still fun though and I'm glad you had a good time. To be honest with you, my last few trips to Mexico (Ixtapa and Los Brailles) resulted in marginal fishing and only several good days out of 15 or more days fishing, over the last 5 years. I think some areas are getting hit really hard by charters and even more so by commercial pangas. The one nice exception was Cedros; I think the remoteness really saves the fishing. Looking foreword to seeing you there in Sept !!


Cheers:

Todd

[bhale1]

Sounds like a great time with family....congrats to your son BTW. Looks like you had nice weather too!
Brett

[Crow]

Family time is the best time !!

[Ron Jones]

Looks like a great trip, that's fishin'.
Ron Jones

[conchydong]

Great report. I fished the East Cape twice, the first time we got into some 60-80lb Yellowfins and topped it off with a 250lb. +/- Blue Marlin.
The second trip only some small Dorado and a couple football Yellowfins and had to deal with about a million Houndfish eating our baits. Had a great time both trips.
Eating those hamburguesas with the hot chiles from a cart near our hotel and washing them down with some cold beers was a unique experience. On my first trip, I had the pleasure to meet and drink with the late Chuck Byron (Marine Artist) and let me tell you that guy was a hoot.
Catching fish is a bonus, fishing and having fun is what it's all about.

Scott

[Swami805]

Nice trip and report, beautiful place regardless of the fishing. Those sierra are good!

[mo65]

Great report...looked like a blast!

[foakes]

Thanks for the great blow by blow report!

Good times!

Best,

Fred

[Benni3]

That was a fantastic trip and great food,,,,,

[scrinch]

Rich: I had the exact same fishing last time I was there in May last year. Tried hard but little reward ................. unlike the fishing reports being posted on the web !!! Still fun though and I'm glad you had a good time. To be honest with you, my last few trips to Mexico (Ixtapa and Los Brailles) resulted in marginal fishing and only several good days out of 15 or more days fishing, over the last 5 years. I think some areas are getting hit really hard by charters and even more so by commercial pangas. The one nice exception was Cedros; I think the remoteness really saves the fishing. Looking foreword to seeing you there in Sept !!

Cheers, Todd

Yeah the published fishing reports seem to reflect that one boat that got lucky rather than all twelve boats that went out!

[SoCalAngler]

Sounds like some time well spent to me. To bad the fishing was not up to par but that how it goes sometimes. The only way I have found to catch more fish is to spend more time on the water.