The World’s Best Fishing stories by Colin Kearns

Author:Colin Kearns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weldonowen

BAJA BY BIKE

NATE MATTHEWS

There’s a sheet-metal figure of the grim reaper that stands on a highway in the mountains just south of Mulegé, about halfway down the Baja Peninsula’s eastern coastline. It’s an eerie-looking thing, a shrine to a dead traveler, with a scythe in one hand and an owl perched on the other. The owl’s eyes are holes punched out of the rusting iron. You can look through them and see dorado breaking bait on the surface of the Sea of Cortez, 1,000 feet below.

I saw the reaper this spring when I passed it with some friends on the eighth day of a nine-day Field & Stream adventure spent fishing Baja California, Mexico, by motorcycle. We’d been on the road that day for 10 straight hours and had at least four more to go before we could stop for the night. Our backs were aching; our heads hurt. Chances were good we’d get a shrine of our own if we pushed ourselves much harder.

This trip had been a stretch from the start. A few months earlier I’d convinced myself, my boss, and three of my friends that we could fish our way from San Diego to Cabo and back in just nine days. Four down, three to catch marlin and roosterfish on Baja’s East Cape, then a speed run back north, 1,100 miles up Mexico’s infamous Highway 1 in time to catch a flight back to New York City. Just to make things interesting, I was doing this without having ridden a motorcycle in my life. I’d crossed the border into Mexico using a learner’s permit.

There were two reasons I wanted to visit Baja. First, it has one of the most fertile fisheries left in the world. The Gulf of California, a.k.a. the Sea of Cortez, boils with marlin, wahoo, dorado, and yellowfin tuna. And then there are the roosters, vicious inshore predators that grow to 100 pounds and chase prey right into the surf. They look cool in pictures, and you can catch them from the beach.

Second, Baja is a practical place to have an uncanned adventure. Tickets to San Diego are cheap; the border is only 20 minutes from the airport. If you don’t mind eating beans three times a day and sleeping on the beach, you can fish your brains out for weeks without burning up your bank account.

I wanted to fish Baja by motorcycle because: (1) the right bike can get to places on the peninsula most cars can’t reach; (2) the riding down there is the stuff of legend; and (3) I figured I’d get a richer sense of the place if I toured it with my head in the open air.

My partners on this trip were my best friend, Kurt Stoddard, adventure photographer Tim Romano, and Quad Off-Road Magazine editor Nick Nelson. Kurt is a flight instructor from Lansing, Michigam. We were roommates in college and have been traveling buddies for almost a decade. Tim lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is one of the voices behind the flyfishing blog on fieldandstream.

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