I recently wrote an article in this publication about my month long experience living and working on a fishing boat in Cabo San Lucas. Once that month had own by, I unintentionally found myself in an epic adventure that lasted almost four months.
There is something about living in Mexico, while working long and hard catching big fish and winding down at the end of the day in party town, where apparently cool women who work on boats drink for free. All of that just made the time zip by like nothing at all.
The four months that I spent there felt like days, with not a bad one in the mix. It was such an incredible time that it is next to impossible to describe in just one article. (There will be more)
After the month of July, no more rooster fish were caught along the shoreline, but an abundance of small mahi and tuna had taken their place. It became common practice to load up our live well with buckets of sardines in addition to the usual dozen goggle eyes. On our way offshore, or back in again, we would stop the boat about a mile offshore and y line sardines on a 2/0 j-hook. While we were stacked up in a convoy of boats all doing the same thing, the small tuna and peanut mahi would smash these top water snacks relentlessly. It was a great way to grab some easy dinner, that is, if you could land your fish before the local sea lions took their share.
When catching the tiny tuna, it became tradition to pop the heart out of the gills, while still beating and munch it down with a little lime and a beer chaser. It wasn’t too bad, something like wet tuna jerky, but more appealing.
The bigger tuna were the main prize. After giving the clients a taste of catching the little guys, we would head offshore to hunt the big ones. We would be clustering together with other boats that were also following the pods of spinner dolphins. We landed a few monsters, but too often we would waste time with a shark.
Trolling for marlin was a daily task and while often successful, the number of sailfish we landed as ‘bycatch’ was unbelievable. I even heard people refer to them as a plague and indeed their numbers almost fit this definition throughout September and October.
The crew may have been bored by the sails and sought only the blue and black marlin, but I was always excited by each catch. Releasing sailfish all day was just fine by me, until my epic failure. I was reviving a sailfish at the side of the boat and the movements I was making had attracted another predator I was unaware of. The boat was in gear and with one hand on the bill and another on the dorsal, I weaved it through the current while it regained its strength. When I felt it ghting again, I gently released
it and watched the sail slowly kick off into the depths. I loved reviving the fish and it was always somewhat of a spiritual experience for me. I was feeling good about my beautiful moment returning the sail to its home and I heard the clients on the other side of the boat trying to spot the fish and say “oh there it is over there” and pointed in the opposite direction. I was confused, because it was still diving on my left side, so I turned to the right and saw something dive quickly into the depths. Oh crap, I watched in horror as the sail fish came out of the water horizontally in the jaws of a dang sea lion. I reached out my hand and let out a slow motion nooooooo, but it did nothing to help. The sea lion swam away with the sail fish’s head in its mouth, with the bill protruding from the predators face like some sort of uni-seal or narwhal. So much for my spiritual moment.
There was never a dull moment during my Cabo adventure, with head scratching moments like catching a parrot fish using a strawberry for bait, or seeing a marlin swimming in 3 feet of water in the marina and watching someone catch it barehanded. There was also the day that we had a double hook up on marlin, only to discover that it was only one hungry marlin that was landed with a hook in each corner of its mouth.
I can’t say enough good things about fishing with Blue Sky in Cabo, so please treat yourself to the first-hand experience. Don’t forget to tip your mates! 🙂
Quinlyn Haddon
quinlynhaddon@gmail.com
blueskyfishing.net
