PHOTO 1: The hated ones! Pelicans lining up at the buffet!

PHOTO 2: Waiting below if you can just away from the birds! Lemons into lemonade?

PHOTO 3: Some of the crank baits and swim baits you can use to get below the surface and away from pesky birds.

BIRDS BE GONE

Originally published in Western Outdoor News the Week of April 22, 2009

We were shivering as we turned the corner and out of the cove in the early morning light. It was chilly. Brrrrrrr….I looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy with all the layers of clothing I was wearing.

My answer to not having a heavy jacket here in Mexico is to pile layer upon layer of shirts on. I had on one medium t-shirt; a large t-shirt; an XL flannel shirt and a big windbreaker over all of that. I looked like I’d raided a second hand store.

But these spring mornings before the sun comes up can get cold on the water, even down here in sunny Baja. And it was breezy too. No, I take it back, it was windy. Even in the light of dawn, I could already see dust devils and clouds of dust and haze rising as I looked back towards the land. I throttled up on the Honda outboard and hunkered forward while pulling up my collar.

I could already see that past the wind line of the point, we probably we not going to be able to cross the channel today. I guess we could, but it would be a rough wet crossing in the panga.

It looked like most of the fleet came to the same conclusion as I could see other boats opting to fish the rocky shorelines on the lee side of the point to keep out of the wind as much as possible.

The good thing was that there was a lot of bait fish in there. The bad thing was that all the birds knew that too…pelicans, frigates, gulls…the whole Mexican aviary was there on the buffet line. The fact that 30 panga captains were tossing handfuls of sardines into the air to chum fish didn’t help either. It was getting ugly.

Every boat was hooking bird after bird. Most of you have been there if you’ve spent any time on the water. Almost every bait that hit the water with a hook in it got bulls-eyed. We got a few cabrilla (Mexican seabass) but by our 5th pelican, that was it.

The last thing I had thrown into my tackle case that morning was my little plastic box of crank baits. Generically known as Rapalas, these are generally hard-bodied fish shaped lures that have a plastic or metal “lip” on them. This lip causes them to dive when cast and retrieved or slow trolled. Bigger the lip, the deeper the dive.

Many a fishing trip has been saved by having a crank bait aboard. Often, they catch the largest fish of the day. When trolling, you don’t go through as much bait and you also cover a lot more water too. This increases your hook-up odds!

Today, they saved our sanity.

By using the smaller 4-inch sized baits, and trolling them, we resolved our bird issue. I used models that had small the medium lips. I didn’t want them to dive too deep. If they dive too deep, they’d get hung up in the rocks. That surely happened several times so you have to be careful.

But, when fishing structure and slow trolling like this, you want to get as close to the structure as possible. That’s where all these Mexican rockfish like snapper, pargo, cabrilla, etc. lurk waiting to ambush a bait swimming by. The strike, even from a smaller fish, can be ferocious as it grabs and attempts to get back to its hole.

It’s a lot like jig fishing or bait fishing in the rocks. If you don’t lose the occasional rig, you’re not close enough to the bottom. It’s a given you’ll lose a few. But, whoever is driving the boat needs to keep an eye on the depths lest you wipe out a whole tackle box of lures before too long.

The patterns (and some of the are incredibly realistic these days) were generally similar to the sardine baits we were using for chum. Silver side with a darker blue, black or purple dorsal ridge. One strange pattern that seems to work tremendously, however, even when I’ve fished other parts of the Sea of Cortez is a rainbow trout pattern. Don’t ask me why. It’s just deadly!

But we got fish-after-fish and often with double hookups when others were still dodging birds. The lures run just deep enough below the surface so the birds can’t get to them. But, they run deep enough that the predatory fish can’t resist them.

Keep some in your tackle at all times. You just never know! We hit a couple of stops where were just could not stop whatever hit the lures. And I know it wasn’t rocks! Rocks don’t swim away!



That’s my story. If you ever want to reach me, my e-mail is riplipboy@aol.com.