La Paz or El Dorado? : ‘Butler’s Bay’ Definitely Rich in Marlin, Sailfish and Tuna, but Best Thing Is, You Don’t Have to Go Far to Get Them

High atop a desert road an hour or so from town, the sky seems to open, and, looking down, a sea of towering cacti gives way to the vast and beautiful Sea of Cortez.

The sun seems to actually rise from the edge of the sea, a wavering ball of fire that sets the morning sky aglow. The gulf is deserted, its glassy surface yet unbroken by the local commercial fishing fleet. Cerralvo Island, silhouetted by the sun, looms off the coast, a dark and barren mass.

“This is my favorite spot in all of Baja, this view,” said Bob Butler, squinting as he gazed out over the arroyos toward the sunlit horizon.

But if all is quiet on the shimmering sea, beneath the surface an aquamarine world is buzzing with life.

Marlin and sailfish use the new day’s light to seek out and slash at schools of bait fish. Sleek and slender wahoo, with speed to burn and teeth like needles, patrol the channels and underwater canyons. Man-sized pargo lurk in the cavernous depths, ready to inhale anything that swims by.

Each summer and fall, tuna roam the blue water, covering great distances in their search for food, often swimming beneath leaping porpoises.

And the most colorful and acrobatic fish in the sea--dorado, called mahi mahi in Hawaii--flock to anything that floats and thus are easy pickings for anyone with rod and reel.

Butler’s friends call this area “Butler’s Bay,” because for 15 years he has been doing business here. He runs his panga -fishing operation out of his home in La Paz, but it is one of only two--the other is the Mosquito Fleet--that concentrate on the remote waters off Punta Arena de la Ventana, or Las Arenas, about 30 miles southeast of the city.

Unlike the crowded waters off Cabo San Lucas, where several boats often chase one marlin, and where the smell of diesel exhaust fills the air, those off Las Arenas are uncluttered and pristine. Game fish thrive almost a stone’s throw from shore.

“It’s great,” said Roger Rosen, 49, a West Los Angeles attorney who has fished throughout Mexico and recently made his first visit to Las Arenas. “There’s nobody on the beach there, and what’s really neat is that you get into a panga and 15-20 minutes later you’re fishing. There are tons of tuna, and tons of dorado right there.”

Butler’s operation runs smoothly now, but it got off to a rocky start in 1981, partly because of the rough-edged pangeros hired from the ejido , or fishing village of San Pedro, who were not only largely separated from Mexican society--many never leave home except for a quick trip to La Paz for supplies--but lacked any real contact with gringos .

“They all had these long, dark beards and their clothes were held together by safety pins . . . they looked like gangsters,” Butler recalled.

Their pangas had no floorboards, offered only hard wooden benches to sit on and no shelter from a relentless Baja sun powerful enough to burn skin through a T-shirt.

Butler said that before he took one of his first groups to the area, he hired three cabin cruisers with La Paz-based skippers used to dealing with Americans to meet them at the beach, just in case.

The passengers got dropped off the next morning, took one look at the cruisers and another at pangeros and scrambled to the cruisers.

“But those guys in the pangas , they really know the area, and they outfished the cruisers to the point where by the third day, the (passengers) were all fighting to get into the pangas ,” Butler said.

His skippers still hail from San Pedro. But most of them have done well enough with the money Butler pays--significantly more than they could make selling fish to a broker in the refrigerated truck who comes to the beach each afternoon--to buy proper clothing and outfit their pangas with swivel-seats and canopies for shade.

They call Butler at his home in La Paz every afternoon to see how many boats he needs the next day, and are waiting on the beach at the crack of dawn.

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A recent trip with Butler began at 5 a.m., when the rest of La Paz was asleep. Leaving the city, the van entered a land watched over seemingly by nothing but cardon cactus, some 30 feet high. The trips are perfectly timed in that the van reaches the top of the hill, where the sea comes into view, as the sun begins to emerge on the horizon.

The van rolled on, through a countryside cut with deep canyons and lush with desert vegetation rejuvenated by recent rains. At the bottom of the hill is the agricultural community of San Juan De Los Planes, surrounded by fields of chilies, cotton, tomatoes and corn.

Nearer the beach is San Pedro, the community of commercial fishermen.

The paved road ends here and the short ride to the beach is bumpy, but tolerable. A huge salt marsh is visible a quarter-mile or so from the water. Workers in long pants and long-sleeved shirts use long, broom-like instruments to work the shallow pits and push the salt into piles. The marsh is protected from sea breezes by dunes and the temperatures reach well into the 100s, yet the workers toil throughout much of the day.

At the beach, the commercial fishermen had already left, motoring off to and beyond Cerralvo Island, a 15-mile-long land mass where wild goats graze and whose waters are notorious for giant snapper, or pargo.

Two pangeros remained for Butler and another group. One of them, Gildardo Lucero, a 44-year-old man with a sun-wrinkled face, is called “the Predator” by Butler because of his knack for finding fish.

It soon became apparent, however, that one doesn’t always need such a knack in this part of the world.

Schools of bait fish, being chased from below, were fluttering on the surface in large patches offshore.

Not five minutes from the beach, a sailfish “spy-hopped” twice not 30 feet from the boat, sticking its head out of the water as if to get a better look at these intruders.

Butler, using a light rig with 16-pound test, cast a live sardine and within seconds the sailfish was hooked. It came to life immediately, dancing on its tail and shaking its head. When that didn’t shake the hook, it ran off 50 yards of line in about five seconds and then leaped and tail-walked again.

Butler had it to the boat in about 15 minutes, though, and the Predator carefully unhooked the quivering billfish and let it go.

He then set a course for a series of buoys rigged by commercial fishermen with chunks of fish used to catch sharks. But sharks were not what the Predator was after. A live sardine cast to a buoy immediately produced a hookup with a fair-sized dorado that leaped and shook.

When Butler reeled his fish within range, the Predator stuck it with his gaff and plopped it into the hold at the bow of his boat. “We need a few fish for dinner tonight,” Butler said.

While he was fighting the fish, the water came alive as others, thrown into a frenzy, began darting about, flashing colors of metallic green and yellow. The fish are off limits to commercial fishermen and thus thrive throughout southern Baja.

“This has been the best dorado fishing in all the 25 years I’ve lived here,” Butler said. “You could throw anything in and catch one.”

The Predator went to another buoy and, in another panga , Butler’s nephew, Cody, and a friend, George Cole, were hooked up to larger fish, eventually muscling 20-pounders to the boat.

Butler later hooked one estimated at closer to 50 pounds. It was too much for the huffing and puffing 65-year-old, however, breaking his light line after half an hour.

The Predator winced, fired up his engine and moved on. The only other boat in sight was a private cruiser skippered by an American who was fishing alone. He was leaning over the rail trying to remove a hook from a large billfish when the Predator arrived.

“Anyone want a blue marlin?” the man asked.

When told no, he popped the hook loose and the big billfish swam to freedom. Butler asked him if he had located any tuna and he replied, “Not yet, but that’s what I’m looking for.”

Some of the tuna in this area had been almost 100 pounds, although most have been closer to 30.

“Those are the ones I’m after,” Cole said. “The big ones are more work than anything else.”

It didn’t matter. Not even the Predator, it seemed, could find the tuna. Or the porpoises they often follow.

The fishermen didn’t care. The sun had begun to take its toll. Sweat poured freely and the only relief came when the boat was moving, creating an artificial breeze.

The Predator made one last stop on the way back, about 100 yards off a barren part of the coast called Punta Perico. There was little reason for optimism; the ocean seemed lifeless.

“Tuna,” the Predator said, pointing down.

No one quite believed him, but everyone cast anyway. To the surprise of some, line began to spin from one of the passenger’s reels. He clicked it into gear and the rod tip bent and the hook was set.

A small yellowfin tuna was brought to the surface, gaffed and thrown into the hold. Another hookup resulted in another tuna. Before long the boat was surrounded by feeding fish.

“That’s why he’s called the Predator,” Butler said, smiling.

Dozens of fish were landed before the fishermen quit.

After the boat hit the beach and the fish were cleaned, the van headed for La Paz. When it reached the memorable summit on B.C. 286, no one looked back.