October, 2020

      Punta Pescadero in the Sea of Cortez

9/28 - 10/5: This was our first (fishing) trip out of the country since the onset of the C19 issue.  We're still forbidden entry to our regular October visit to the Seychelles so we opted for the only nearby place that seemed open to tolerating anyone from the good ole US of A.  It turned out to be a decent experience.  Strangely the only real negative to the trip was the unusually high temperatures coupled with a lack of breezes that kept us from spending too much time out in the sun.  Oops. The other downer was the quality of the kayaks which frankly were awful.  Let's get on with the good stuff.

Travel there is easy from our place in Green Valley.  It was from the Tucson airport to Phoenix and then nonstop to Cabo del San Jose.  The balance of the trip to this somewhat isolated resort just north of Los Barriles was by a fairly pricey shuttle in a Chevy Suburban.  A bit costly at $360 for the round trip.  But overall the week's stay including having our doggies dog sat at our home in AZ was roughly $3k which works out as dirt cheap compared to most of the other places we visit.

It's a really nice looking resort.  (See video).  Good sized rooms that have been tastefully updated over the years.  Comfy king sized bed, plenty of indoor and outdoor seating and a nice bathroom and shower area.  We also had a small fridge for things we wanted to keep cool and a TV too.  Not used to having the latter at most of the places to which we travel.

The main lodge has a decent sized dining room, a pleasant "sports bar" with covered and uncovered seating areas.  The feeding setup may sound a bit strange and meager, but compared to what a lot of the similar sized resorts do in that regard as utterly unpleasant specifically timed group seating for lunch and dinner, this worked out great.  There was a chalk board at the "bar" listing some fairly simple choices any of which could literally be ordered at any time of day.  Wine was overpriced as might be expected, but cervezas and diet cokes were reasonable.

Our breakfast was included in the room price and offered several options.  All the food was nicely prepared and presented although sometimes the accompaniments varied from meal to meal.

Fishing was probably not as good as I had expected.  As we drove along the shoreline getting to the resort, because of the very rocky structure all the way along the coast, I had visions of a strike on every cast.  It turns out that too much of a good thing is not necessarily a good thing (as in too much good structure does not always equal good fishing.)  Even at higher tides fish were much more spread out that we thought would be the case.

 The close in shoreline in most places had a decent number of resident groupers, snappers, and similar species, but ................they simply were not within our fly casting reach when the tides were at low ebb.  So we had to pretty much limit our fishing to the few hours around a high tide.  We also had no sighting of the "roosters" that we'd hoped to see here.  When a group of marauding pelagic fish came by driving prey species close to the shore, those predators turned out to be some of the local jacks.  Not that they weren't bad fun to hook, but it really wasn't the kind of fishing we'd anticipated.  Nonetheless I'm certain we'll go back here again though we will pay more attention to the tidal hours.

Probably the most impressive thing about this resort is that they were fully staffed - even though for several days of our stay, there were no more than four of us "touristas" staying here.  Again, interestingly, most of the visitors were Mexican nationals.  That speaks well for the place.

Here's a likely overly long video of the trip:

Last Logbook Entry  � for previous day

10/8-10:  This was what has become a quick trip to Northern Arizona to do some casting for large breeder rainbows in Silver Creek.  Frankly we find the whole process a bit repulsive, but we're so hungry, not to eat trout, but to catch and release a few, that we do the excursion for a couple days each year.  If we had any other alternative to do some conventional trout fishing around here, we'd not do this again.  In any case, here's the video from the trip this October:

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