BEACH FISHING BAJA
Roosterfish Capital Of The World!
Sea of Cortez-Punta Colorada
By Terry W. Sheely
Scrunching sandals and toes deeper into the warm sand of the East Cape beach I gain a little casting leverage pause while an incoming roller pushes a welt of turquoise water up and over my shorts, and then I heave a cast as hard as I can. The faux-mullet lure is still hanging in the air, trailing a long thin tail of monofilament when I spot the small flock of roosterfish ghosting past. Except for their bandito black stripes and waving tails they are almost invisible, and barely five feet off my big toe.
I’m still staring at them when the lure hits the water. Conditioned reflexes drop the rod tip into the retrieve. It’s a slight movement but enough to flush the flock, leaving only fine white sand swirls to dissolve in the transparent water.
A cast too far—again.
“They’re in the surf,” somebody yells, “Rooster in the surf coming down at you!!” It takes me a second to locate my volunteer advisor—hanging over the brick wall on the patio of our mutual fish camp, Hotel Punta Colorada. He’s above and behind me wearing Polaroid glasses with a fish hawk’s overhead view of the breaking surf line.
I’m cranking line like a crazed dervish, when he hollers again---“Ahhhh, they turned back. Sorry,” and then with a salutary tip of his salt encrusted glass he disappears behind the brickwork.
In just a handful of minutes I’ve been blown away by two schools of feeding roosters. But if Rieser’s right there’s no need to worry. This long, lonesome stretch of the Sea of Cortez will have plenty more to offer, and there’s not another fisherman in sight.
I move a few feet out into the water turn and throw a cast parallel the beach landing in the rollers that are surfing onto the beach and collapsing in a musical whooshing sound. I hop the jig and brown plastic tube bait across the sand, sending up spurts of sand, looking, I hope, like an edible crab or squid.
A trio of brightly-colored kayaks is nosed into the sand and rocks above the tide line to my left, and a couple of quad tracks are etched into the soft sand behind me. Nothing else. Hard to believe, but I’m standing on a public beach in Baja, Mexico with a loaded rod, being zoomed by squads of coveted game fish with miles of productive beach to fish and not another angler in sight.
Sweet!
It’s not always so spectacularly lonesome Mike Rieser had warned. Sometimes you’ll see another beach caster. If it happens—just move. It’s all good. Miles of productive lonesome places begging to be walked and fished between the beachside fishing town of LaRibera andPunta Arenas. Fortunately for me, the fishing beach below Punta Colorada is square between the two.
I adjust the straps on my daypack—handy for extra tackle and food-- gulp some water, pick up my rods (two heavy spinning outfits and a 10-weight fly rod) and splash through the surf heading toward a pile of rocks that are breaking the surface a couple of hundred feet north. At dinner two nights earlier a snorkeler had vividly described his experiences diving around the clusters of rock along the surf line. Every cluster, he had told me, was alive with small fish, concentrations of baitfish, and we all know what small baitfish attract.
Mike Rieser knows. He wears the deep tan lines of a Baja Believer now 30 years into a career guiding and outfitting fishermen up and down the big lonely of southeast Baja. Beach anglers on this side of the Sea of Cortez are still somewhat of a rarity, compared to the number of fishermen on cruisers or pangas, but every season, Rieser tells me, there’s a few more enlightened piscatorialists legging it along the sand in sandals, shorts, and big shady hats, traveling the surf line in a kayak, or heading for the quivering mirage of a distant promise in a sand-squirting quad.
Rieser wandered down here 30-years ago from his Colorado trout digs sniffed the salt air, clobbered a couple of billfish, tackled tuna, got ravaged by roosters, hurled flies from the warm white beach and never looked back. Now he lives most of the year in sandals, shorts and sun screen and runs an outfitting business, Baja Flyfishing Company,
(www.bajaflyfish.com)based at Van Wormer’s Hotel Punta Colorada
(www.vanwormerresorts.com).
Rieser provides beach bangers with a solid inventory of saltwater tackle and flies, and offers custom options from day and multi-day fishing packages of fully guided saltwater fishing in cruisers or super pangas, or his personal love--beach-fishing from four-wheeler quads or kayaks. At Punta Colorada, within a few miles of shore anglers target blue, black and striped marlin, sailfish, dorado, wahoo, yellowfin tuna, roosterfish, jack crevalle, pargo, sierra, mackerel, amberjacks. More than 80 varieties of sport fish prowl these waters, and a good many of them, especially the powerful jacks (which includes roosterfish), sierra and bonito haunt the beaches.
And while Rieser prefers fly fishing (“I can have a novice casting well enough to hook-up in 45 minutes”) he has nothing against conventional beach casting tackle-especially those long 10 to 12 foot spinning rods carrying over-sized spools that will spill great loops of line into football field-long casts and still have enough line to soak up the first powerful run.
Pick your weapon, Eduardo had said, fly, spinning, bait casting, jigging, standup, sit-down, beach-casting, cruisers, pangas—anyway I wanted it. “We got it all,” he said matter-of-factly.
Eduardo “Eddie” Dalmau is general manager of Van Wormer Resorts, Sea of Cortez specialists and we met at one of the outdoor shows on the West Coast. Their Hotel Punta Colorada is basically a comfortable fish camp that sits on an isolated piece of spectacular sea shore overlooking 62,000 square miles of East Cape fishing. A protected fish reserve at Punta Arena is just three miles up the beach. Every morning, on the way to breakfast, I’m stopped cold by the sight of massive surface boils erupting where tuna, porpoises, dorado, roosterfish, yellowtail and who knows what other terror of predators are tearing into sardines, ballyhoo, mullet and flying fish. It’s a sight that kicks the day’s fishing into high expectations early.
This hotel is not a deluxe, white-linen, pink flower in your nightcap kind of resort. It’s the kind of place you hope to find when all you want is to thaw out from winter, get abused by smoking hot fish, feel beach sand between your toes, lick the salt off five-star margaritas and enjoy drip-down-your-elbow seviche’ while bragging about the one that spooled you.
This is the spot—the signs say—that reigns as “Roosterfish Capital of the World,” and I’ve yet to meet anyone willing to argue, certainly no one with their toes dug into the sand watching expensive line vaporize into the sea.
While a extensive and challenging slew of game fish can be nailed by casting flies, lures or lobbing live bait from the beach, nothing rules this beach like Roosterfish, some as big as 90 pounds, a lot more at 40 to 50 and swarms of 5 to 20 pounders. My biggest, last May, was a 60 pounder. That same afternoon Greg Powell abused a standard Northwest salmon rod by fighting a rooster for more than 2½ hours and losing it. Local guys who should know estimated the big bull at more than 75 pounds.
Greg hooked up while fishing in a panga just off the sand and cactus in water well within range of beach casts. These big roosters, amberjack and crevalle, Rieser says, have no qualms about coming into skinny water to feed on big wet flies, spoons or jigs.
The hotel caters to conventional tackle diehards and fly rod masochists equally and can provide good gear, a fleet of kayaks and beach quads, or cruisers and pangas.
Location is what makes this southeast corner of Baja so productive. It’s a junction where currents from the Sea of Cortez collide with the Pacific and pile up bait and game fish into a maelstrom of concentrated billfish, Dorado, tuna, yellowtail, jack crevalle, cabrilla, wahoo, swarms of baitfish and most every other migratory species of warm water game fish known in the Baja. Incredible tuna schools have been verified here that are more than 100 miles long.
My advice—go for the beach bash but save a day for a panga junket to tangle with black, blue and striped marlin, sails, tuna, wahoo, dorado and amberjack.
Back from the edge of the soft blue water, this region is a rugged place. The miles of untracked white sand at Punta Colorada form a narrow edge on a withered desert where shriveled cactus poke through Baja hardscrabble, thorns rake across leafless bushes and roadrunners zing along the road. It takes more than an hour on two-lane Highway 1 to get here from Alaska Air’s terminal at the Cabo San Lucas airport customs station—which is a decent distance from the stressed-out over-commercialized postcard Baja.
The hotel sprinklers create a green oasis in a desert sea of desolate brown. From the flat stone walkways I get a pelican-eye view of unrolling surf and scarlet sunrises, and the beach.
The rock pile I’m targeting is well within range of the 10-foot, 6-inch spinning rod that’s carrying 17-pound test monofilament (just asking to get spooled, I know), but it’s further than I can throw the fly tackle that Rieser has set up specifically for these beaches.
His recommendation is for beach fishermen to keep everything basic and as simple as possible.
For the growing cadre of fly flingers, Rieser recommends 8 to 12 weight fly rods. He advises using a four-foot butt section of 30-pound soft mono for 8 and 9 weight rods and 40-pound soft butt sections for bigger sticks.
He builds a perfection loop knot to both ends of the butt section and adds three feet of 12 to 16 pound test tippet for 9 weights and up to 20 pound for 10 weights and up. Total leader length should be less than nine feet.
“For big roosters,” he explains, “I do like a double loop connection to the butt starting with a Bimini twist to create a large single loop, doubling that with either a surgeons or King sling to get the double loop. This system has served us well for many years. It is also a very smooth connection to the loop in the fly line as there is no knot at the top of the butt, just the doubled over part of the leader.”
Rieser has also developed a line of large wet flies that can be cast, trolled with the kayaks or attached to spinning outfits with sliding sinkers or jig heads for casting weight. Five-inch lures and flies are about the minimum for beach casting, Eddie says, and while a lot of anglers use Krocodile style casting spoons, jigs and plastics also draw strikes. Soft baits, though, don’t stand up well to aggressive fish with teeth.
Honed 7/0 to 9/0 J or circle hooks are recommended and bring a sharpener. These fish have hard mouths.
My fishing buddy Jim Goerg brought along a pack of 5-inch Berkley Powerbait
Saltwater Power Mullets, and the first strike he got was all teeth and no pull. His reward was a power mullet head. The body was gone. Realistic soft plastics draw savage strikes, but they don’t stand up well to fish with teeth, which is why feathered leaded jigs and spoons are preferred.
One of Rieser’s favorite beach patterns, which also fishes well off spinning rods if casting weight is added, is tied to resemble a mullet on 5/0-6/0 Gamakatsu circle hooks. The big hook acts as a keel and helps stabilized the fly on fast retrieves.
I caught a 20-pound amberjack on a flashy No. 7 chrome Krocodile spoon with a deer hair trailer, a hefty wobbling lure that seemed to appeal to just about every non-billfish on the East Cape on a jig and flutter
retrieve.
Lures and flies alike typically imitate mullet, ballyhoo or sardines—staples of the inshore baitfish.
When you’re beach fishing my advise is to pack plenty of spares. The rocks that attract game fish will eat their weight in lures and flies if you let them, but it’s the fish with teeth that you need to watch out for. Putting the hooks to a 70 pound fish in the surf line is one thing—getting it up to the sand is a whole other challenge.
But the endless beach at Punta Colorada a great place to practice!
Baja Beach Bashing Info:
Punta Colorada is on the Sea of Cortez side of the Baja Peninsula just south of the small town of LaRibera off Highway 1, about an hour north of the international airport and customs station at Cabo San Lucas. Shuttle transportation to Hotel Punta Colorada can be arranged.
I fished it in mid-May, at the start of the season, and while there’s not a horrible fishing month on the calendar, between May and November offer the top beach fishing, especially for roosterfish, assorted snappers, wahoo, sierra, amberjack and crevalle.
June and July are hot—both for concentrated game fish and tropical temperatures.
Bring plenty of PF 50 sunscreen, a big hat for shade and lures. There’s not a lot of spinning lures available locally for freelance fishermen. Both BFC and Van Wormer’s provide tackle for guided and chartered fishing and can arrange kayaks and beach quads.
Contact:
Baja Flyfishing Company
Mike Rieser
1-877-572-5012 (toll free)
www.bajaflyfish.com
Van Wormer Resorts
Eddie Dalmau,
1-877-777-8862 (toll free)
www.vanwormerresorts.com
Scrunching sandals and toes deeper into the warm sand of the East Cape beach I gain a little casting leverage pause while an incoming roller pushes a welt of turquoise water up and over my shorts, and then I heave a cast as hard as I can. The faux-mullet lure is still hanging in the air, trailing a long thin tail of monofilament when I spot the small flock of roosterfish ghosting past. Except for their bandito black stripes and waving tails they are almost invisible, and barely five feet off my big toe.
I’m still staring at them when the lure hits the water. Conditioned reflexes drop the rod tip into the retrieve. It’s a slight movement but enough to flush the flock, leaving only fine white sand swirls to dissolve in the transparent water.
A cast too far—again.
“They’re in the surf,” somebody yells, “Rooster in the surf coming down at you!!” It takes me a second to locate my volunteer advisor—hanging over the brick wall on the patio of our mutual fish camp, Hotel Punta Colorada. He’s above and behind me wearing Polaroid glasses with a fish hawk’s overhead view of the breaking surf line.
I’m cranking line like a crazed dervish, when he hollers again---“Ahhhh, they turned back. Sorry,” and then with a salutary tip of his salt encrusted glass he disappears behind the brickwork.
In just a handful of minutes I’ve been blown away by two schools of feeding roosters. But if Rieser’s right there’s no need to worry. This long, lonesome stretch of the Sea of Cortez will have plenty more to offer, and there’s not another fisherman in sight.
I move a few feet out into the water turn and throw a cast parallel the beach landing in the rollers that are surfing onto the beach and collapsing in a musical whooshing sound. I hop the jig and brown plastic tube bait across the sand, sending up spurts of sand, looking, I hope, like an edible crab or squid.
A trio of brightly-colored kayaks is nosed into the sand and rocks above the tide line to my left, and a couple of quad tracks are etched into the soft sand behind me. Nothing else. Hard to believe, but I’m standing on a public beach in Baja, Mexico with a loaded rod, being zoomed by squads of coveted game fish with miles of productive beach to fish and not another angler in sight.
Sweet!
It’s not always so spectacularly lonesome Mike Rieser had warned. Sometimes you’ll see another beach caster. If it happens—just move. It’s all good. Miles of productive lonesome places begging to be walked and fished between the beachside fishing town of LaRibera andPunta Arenas. Fortunately for me, the fishing beach below Punta Colorada is square between the two.
I adjust the straps on my daypack—handy for extra tackle and food-- gulp some water, pick up my rods (two heavy spinning outfits and a 10-weight fly rod) and splash through the surf heading toward a pile of rocks that are breaking the surface a couple of hundred feet north. At dinner two nights earlier a snorkeler had vividly described his experiences diving around the clusters of rock along the surf line. Every cluster, he had told me, was alive with small fish, concentrations of baitfish, and we all know what small baitfish attract.
Mike Rieser knows. He wears the deep tan lines of a Baja Believer now 30 years into a career guiding and outfitting fishermen up and down the big lonely of southeast Baja. Beach anglers on this side of the Sea of Cortez are still somewhat of a rarity, compared to the number of fishermen on cruisers or pangas, but every season, Rieser tells me, there’s a few more enlightened piscatorialists legging it along the sand in sandals, shorts, and big shady hats, traveling the surf line in a kayak, or heading for the quivering mirage of a distant promise in a sand-squirting quad.
Rieser wandered down here 30-years ago from his Colorado trout digs sniffed the salt air, clobbered a couple of billfish, tackled tuna, got ravaged by roosters, hurled flies from the warm white beach and never looked back. Now he lives most of the year in sandals, shorts and sun screen and runs an outfitting business, Baja Flyfishing Company,
(www.bajaflyfish.com)based at Van Wormer’s Hotel Punta Colorada
(www.vanwormerresorts.com).
Rieser provides beach bangers with a solid inventory of saltwater tackle and flies, and offers custom options from day and multi-day fishing packages of fully guided saltwater fishing in cruisers or super pangas, or his personal love--beach-fishing from four-wheeler quads or kayaks. At Punta Colorada, within a few miles of shore anglers target blue, black and striped marlin, sailfish, dorado, wahoo, yellowfin tuna, roosterfish, jack crevalle, pargo, sierra, mackerel, amberjacks. More than 80 varieties of sport fish prowl these waters, and a good many of them, especially the powerful jacks (which includes roosterfish), sierra and bonito haunt the beaches.
And while Rieser prefers fly fishing (“I can have a novice casting well enough to hook-up in 45 minutes”) he has nothing against conventional beach casting tackle-especially those long 10 to 12 foot spinning rods carrying over-sized spools that will spill great loops of line into football field-long casts and still have enough line to soak up the first powerful run.
Pick your weapon, Eduardo had said, fly, spinning, bait casting, jigging, standup, sit-down, beach-casting, cruisers, pangas—anyway I wanted it. “We got it all,” he said matter-of-factly.
Eduardo “Eddie” Dalmau is general manager of Van Wormer Resorts, Sea of Cortez specialists and we met at one of the outdoor shows on the West Coast. Their Hotel Punta Colorada is basically a comfortable fish camp that sits on an isolated piece of spectacular sea shore overlooking 62,000 square miles of East Cape fishing. A protected fish reserve at Punta Arena is just three miles up the beach. Every morning, on the way to breakfast, I’m stopped cold by the sight of massive surface boils erupting where tuna, porpoises, dorado, roosterfish, yellowtail and who knows what other terror of predators are tearing into sardines, ballyhoo, mullet and flying fish. It’s a sight that kicks the day’s fishing into high expectations early.
This hotel is not a deluxe, white-linen, pink flower in your nightcap kind of resort. It’s the kind of place you hope to find when all you want is to thaw out from winter, get abused by smoking hot fish, feel beach sand between your toes, lick the salt off five-star margaritas and enjoy drip-down-your-elbow seviche’ while bragging about the one that spooled you.
This is the spot—the signs say—that reigns as “Roosterfish Capital of the World,” and I’ve yet to meet anyone willing to argue, certainly no one with their toes dug into the sand watching expensive line vaporize into the sea.
While a extensive and challenging slew of game fish can be nailed by casting flies, lures or lobbing live bait from the beach, nothing rules this beach like Roosterfish, some as big as 90 pounds, a lot more at 40 to 50 and swarms of 5 to 20 pounders. My biggest, last May, was a 60 pounder. That same afternoon Greg Powell abused a standard Northwest salmon rod by fighting a rooster for more than 2½ hours and losing it. Local guys who should know estimated the big bull at more than 75 pounds.
Greg hooked up while fishing in a panga just off the sand and cactus in water well within range of beach casts. These big roosters, amberjack and crevalle, Rieser says, have no qualms about coming into skinny water to feed on big wet flies, spoons or jigs.
The hotel caters to conventional tackle diehards and fly rod masochists equally and can provide good gear, a fleet of kayaks and beach quads, or cruisers and pangas.
Location is what makes this southeast corner of Baja so productive. It’s a junction where currents from the Sea of Cortez collide with the Pacific and pile up bait and game fish into a maelstrom of concentrated billfish, Dorado, tuna, yellowtail, jack crevalle, cabrilla, wahoo, swarms of baitfish and most every other migratory species of warm water game fish known in the Baja. Incredible tuna schools have been verified here that are more than 100 miles long.
My advice—go for the beach bash but save a day for a panga junket to tangle with black, blue and striped marlin, sails, tuna, wahoo, dorado and amberjack.
Back from the edge of the soft blue water, this region is a rugged place. The miles of untracked white sand at Punta Colorada form a narrow edge on a withered desert where shriveled cactus poke through Baja hardscrabble, thorns rake across leafless bushes and roadrunners zing along the road. It takes more than an hour on two-lane Highway 1 to get here from Alaska Air’s terminal at the Cabo San Lucas airport customs station—which is a decent distance from the stressed-out over-commercialized postcard Baja.
The hotel sprinklers create a green oasis in a desert sea of desolate brown. From the flat stone walkways I get a pelican-eye view of unrolling surf and scarlet sunrises, and the beach.
The rock pile I’m targeting is well within range of the 10-foot, 6-inch spinning rod that’s carrying 17-pound test monofilament (just asking to get spooled, I know), but it’s further than I can throw the fly tackle that Rieser has set up specifically for these beaches.
His recommendation is for beach fishermen to keep everything basic and as simple as possible.
For the growing cadre of fly flingers, Rieser recommends 8 to 12 weight fly rods. He advises using a four-foot butt section of 30-pound soft mono for 8 and 9 weight rods and 40-pound soft butt sections for bigger sticks.
He builds a perfection loop knot to both ends of the butt section and adds three feet of 12 to 16 pound test tippet for 9 weights and up to 20 pound for 10 weights and up. Total leader length should be less than nine feet.
“For big roosters,” he explains, “I do like a double loop connection to the butt starting with a Bimini twist to create a large single loop, doubling that with either a surgeons or King sling to get the double loop. This system has served us well for many years. It is also a very smooth connection to the loop in the fly line as there is no knot at the top of the butt, just the doubled over part of the leader.”
Rieser has also developed a line of large wet flies that can be cast, trolled with the kayaks or attached to spinning outfits with sliding sinkers or jig heads for casting weight. Five-inch lures and flies are about the minimum for beach casting, Eddie says, and while a lot of anglers use Krocodile style casting spoons, jigs and plastics also draw strikes. Soft baits, though, don’t stand up well to aggressive fish with teeth.
Honed 7/0 to 9/0 J or circle hooks are recommended and bring a sharpener. These fish have hard mouths.
My fishing buddy Jim Goerg brought along a pack of 5-inch Berkley Powerbait
Saltwater Power Mullets, and the first strike he got was all teeth and no pull. His reward was a power mullet head. The body was gone. Realistic soft plastics draw savage strikes, but they don’t stand up well to fish with teeth, which is why feathered leaded jigs and spoons are preferred.
One of Rieser’s favorite beach patterns, which also fishes well off spinning rods if casting weight is added, is tied to resemble a mullet on 5/0-6/0 Gamakatsu circle hooks. The big hook acts as a keel and helps stabilized the fly on fast retrieves.
I caught a 20-pound amberjack on a flashy No. 7 chrome Krocodile spoon with a deer hair trailer, a hefty wobbling lure that seemed to appeal to just about every non-billfish on the East Cape on a jig and flutter
retrieve.
Lures and flies alike typically imitate mullet, ballyhoo or sardines—staples of the inshore baitfish.
When you’re beach fishing my advise is to pack plenty of spares. The rocks that attract game fish will eat their weight in lures and flies if you let them, but it’s the fish with teeth that you need to watch out for. Putting the hooks to a 70 pound fish in the surf line is one thing—getting it up to the sand is a whole other challenge.
But the endless beach at Punta Colorada a great place to practice!
Baja Beach Bashing Info:
Punta Colorada is on the Sea of Cortez side of the Baja Peninsula just south of the small town of LaRibera off Highway 1, about an hour north of the international airport and customs station at Cabo San Lucas. Shuttle transportation to Hotel Punta Colorada can be arranged.
I fished it in mid-May, at the start of the season, and while there’s not a horrible fishing month on the calendar, between May and November offer the top beach fishing, especially for roosterfish, assorted snappers, wahoo, sierra, amberjack and crevalle.
June and July are hot—both for concentrated game fish and tropical temperatures.
Bring plenty of PF 50 sunscreen, a big hat for shade and lures. There’s not a lot of spinning lures available locally for freelance fishermen. Both BFC and Van Wormer’s provide tackle for guided and chartered fishing and can arrange kayaks and beach quads.
Contact:
Baja Flyfishing Company
Mike Rieser
1-877-572-5012 (toll free)
www.bajaflyfish.com
Van Wormer Resorts
Eddie Dalmau,
1-877-777-8862 (toll free)
www.vanwormerresorts.com