The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.4
THE DISRUPTORS: Magdalena Bay’s Crazy Ones
Words, Photos and Captions: Nick Price 2024-06-17 10:11:36
Jako Lucas brings the stoke as Steven Walker lands a striped marlin. Fish that have not been played a long time are often a little feistier at the side of the boat.
Los Locos Mag Bay, in southwestern Baja California, is a disruption. Throw out five-star-luxury everything and replace it with dusty roads and loud music and back-of-the-pickup drives to the boat launch. Long run times to the marlin with the possibility of even longer, bumpier rides back to San Carlos are the norm. Once fishing, it can be a balancing act, standing on either the bow or the stern of a rocking panga while throwing the 12-weight of choice with a giant baitfish imitation and a throttle-happy local captain thumping the hybrid panga gas with surges of excitement. Burritos for breakfast. Burritos for lunch. Dinner somewhere, though the day’s fishing will not revolve around getting back for 5 p.m. cocktails.
This all comes, if you’re a guest, after unanswered offseason email after email, yet somehow you’re here. It appears as though everyone, including the Los Locos team, is in the present tense all day and night leaving no time for answering emails. Fun is the biggest element, and for the relatively short season—end of October through January for striped marlin—the energy level is wildly high. Any daily shortcomings have the gaps filled with activity.
Blue water and the marlin run are the justifications. For this reason alone, yachts and mega yachts have descended on Magdalena Bay waters for decades with their myriad trolled lines, effectively turning captain into de facto angler and angler into human pulley, drawing to stern a heaping volume of tallied catches where numbers outweigh artistry and skillfulness.
Magdalena Bay is also home to the largest mangrove forest in Baja, which is like seeing a cactus in the Amazon. This wild mix of desert-meets-mangroves provides a backdrop for golden trevally, snook, halibut, grouper, snapper and all sorts of other species.
There are sand dunes, too, and some stretch for miles and meet the Pacific where roosterfish and snook and jacks hunt like packs of wolves. Some of these dunes are on the rugged barrier islands of Isla Magdalena and Isla Santa Margarita, which protect Magdalena Bay and the dusty town of San Carlos, Los Locos Mag Bay’s base of operations.
LLMB is George VanDercook and Rudy Babikian. Like pulling together ingredients for a great meal, over the last four years the two have created an exceptional team that incorporates the community in many ways. Pangas built by a local and captained by a local. A restaurant—Lore—jump-started by the pair and frequented by guests and guides, captains in tow. Mar Y Arena, a local hotel and restaurant, that serves as their seaside base.
Part of the team also includes “deckhands” who, along with the captain, accompany each panga. They spend countless hours tying flies before and during the season; late nights at the vice with piles of chicken feathers, thread and 8/0 hooks that will undoubtedly be tested and even broken. They love being on the water—perhaps even need to be on the water, in the same way a judge needs a courtroom. The deckhands are guides in other parts of the world, and for two or three months each year they come to Mag Bay to put in long days on and off the water and generate camaraderie that is an experience from bell to bell.
San Carlos has seen a robust whale-watching industry blossom. From late December into April gray whales and their calves head into the bay. In the blue water outside, feeding marlin crash bait balls of sardines and mackerel. The marlin are generally accompanied by sea lions and sometimes dolphins. Giant schools of dorado are common. Yellowfin and wahoo show up as well. Bryde’s whales hunt the bait balls and lurk like giant submarines.
If merely observing the madness that is striped marlin feeding on bait balls isn’t enough, then picking up a fly rod will sate the eager flyfisher. Your bare feet cling to the wet, textured deck, knees slightly bent for balance, a Mexican captain cheers you on, the two-hour morning run to the fishing grounds was eons ago, marlin are tearing through the crazy blue Pacific, spraying bait, and everyone is screaming—and you realize you haven’t even cast yet.
The bait balls can be static, but more often they move and their movement below the water is mirrored by the frigate birds and gulls and pelicans above. If the bait drops down, the frigate birds climb, and it’s said the frigate birds are as high above the water as the bait is below.
And all the while, grown men and women are screaming, shouting, hooting. It’s chaos. Mayhem in the water and above the water like you’ve never before seen. You’ve never been encouraged like this before, and it’s not just encouragement. It’s pure awe. Raw stoke. The sheer pandemonium is right in front of you, as is the otherworldly neon blue of aroused, feeding marlin. You cast smack dab to the middle of the moving bait—where Rudy nonchalantly said to cast—and you put the rod under your armpit and strip two-handed as fast as you can. Your peripheral vision goes hallucinogenic, but within your line of sight neon blue marlin dart wide-eyed, hunting.
When you come tight, you dance like someone walking on hot coals attempting to clear your line. The reel spins, the fish jumps. Now the fish tries to go deep. It gets its way, and you feel as though you’re pulling on a whale, but after 15 minutes or so—relatively quick—Noah Thompson, deckhand extraordinaire, is grabbing the leader and grabbing the thrashing bill and that neon blue dart is boatside.
If there’s a lull in the action it happens after drifting away from a bait ball, with a fish on, and after landing and releasing the fish. Exhilaration replaces everything. It may have been beautiful. Or maybe not.
Tacón, the captain, turns on the music and dances and grabs a couple of beanbags and throws them to the stern. Tacón Arechiga had a rough life before finding Los Locos and he relishes the opportunity to be high-fiving you. You can tell too. “Amigo,” he says, and hugs you.
Marlin free jump occasionally and humpback whales breach and pound their flukes on the surface, sending spray outward, unmistakable from even hundreds of yards away. Returning, Isla Santa Margarita comes into view, with its stark mountains jutting 1,800 vertical feet above the water. Your new favorite song is playing above the drum of the outboard. The swell grew while fishing and the wind picked up and the boat, under Tacón’s control, bangs the downside of swells sending water over the center console and onto your face. Your back hurts from the pounding but you don’t say anything about it. Everyone’s back hurts.
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