A Sleepy Town on a Lively Sea : Loreto, No More Than a Village on Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, Is Quiet as Usual, but When the Red Dawn Rises, So Do the Yellowtail

As fishermen stopped between two islands to jig for bait, and as Venus faded slowly in the cool, dawn sky, the horizon glowed, and the clouds turned a fiery red.

Another morning had broken in Loreto.

For Arturo Sussarrey, 33, one of a few dozen panga skippers who operate from this economically struggling city of 7,300, it was another day at the office in an area sometimes called the yellowtail capital of the world.

At a point north of here called Pulpito, Sussarrey pointed to a large patch of an otherwise glassy sea churning violently. Hundreds of yellowtail crashed the surface in a collective frenzy, devouring a school of baitfish they had circled and trapped.

Sea gulls, pelicans and fork-tailed frigate birds flew erratically overhead, occasionally diving after whole fish or scraps.

Sussarrey cast a heavy iron lure into the disturbance and reeled as fast as he could. A large yellowtail stopped him in his tracks.

Sussarrey reared back and set the hook, and minutes later, his fishing pole in one hand and his gaff in the other, stuck a fish that came over the rail glistening in the new morning light.

A few other fishermen moved in and battled the strong-swimming jacks until the fish suddenly disappeared--as if they sensed what was happening.

When they surfaced again a few hundred yards away, the skippers gave chase, as did the birds. As the fishermen heaved more lures, catching not only yellowtail but occasionally a species of sea bass called cabrilla, more chaos ensued.

Whales spouted in the distance, dolphins frolicked off the barren Baja coast and raced the skiffs. The ocean seemed alive.

Loreto was anything but.

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Once thought to be growing into a booming resort city, a la Cabo San Lucas, Loreto is the same sleepy, dusty fishing village it was when tourists discovered it in the early 1960s.

There are no huge resorts. No Century 21 signs. No fast-food joints or fancy restaurants.

And though locals and tourists would like to see a reversal of a trend that has fewer people coming here every year, they do not want--nor do they have to worry about--Loreto becoming anything like the bustling Cabo San Lucas.

“The people here are really nice people, and I’d like the city to thrive for them, but, at the same time, I don’t want it to get ruined like Cabo,” said John Mestrin of the Long Beach-based Baja Fishing Adventures. “This doesn’t have the Laguna Beach atmosphere, which is what sells. But that’s one of my selling points. You don’t have salesmen trying to sell you all that time-share (lodging) everywhere you go like you do in Cabo.”

Indeed you don’t. Loreto is all but deserted. Fishermen are afraid of the north wind that, during winter months, sometimes blows so fiercely that it keeps boats at bay.

Some fishermen believe the area has been overfished to the point it is no longer worth a trip. Back-to-back poor seasons in 1992 and ‘93, which locals say is merely the result of a natural cycle, have reinforced those beliefs.

Vicente Campos, 49, a bartender at the Mission Hotel across from Loreto’s malecon , or beachfront boardwalk, said California’s recession also led to a decline in tourism.

“They had no more money to come,” Campos said of the tourists. “I got friends, you know, and I haven’t seen them in three years. They used to come every year.”

None of the four beachfront hotels are booked. In nearby Nopolo at the Loreto Inn, formerly the Stouffer Presidente and the place people thought would put Loreto on the map, there are only a handful of guests. Granted, the hotel is under reconstruction, but it still has 60 rooms and suites.

Management, with the help of Fonatur , Mexico’s tourism agency, is pumping $3 million into the hotel in an effort to turn the tide. White sand is scheduled to be trucked in to give the current dirt-sand beach a more appealing look.

Down the road, a newly-designed championship golf course with spectacular views and extremely challenging holes is part of an effort to entice non-fishing tourists. And it is a golfer’s dream: lush fairways, perfect greens and practically no golfers. A look in the reservation book earlier this month revealed that fewer than 10 foursomes teed off on a given day over a week’s period.

The Loreto Inn and the Oasis Hotel have started using whales to bring in tourists, and it appears to be working. For about $100, customers take a taxi through the picturesque Sierra de la Gigante mountains to Magdalena Bay on the west coast of the peninsula, board a skiff and spend the day watching--and in some cases even touching--gray whales wintering in the bay.

John and Valerie Guarin of Vallejo, Calif., came exclusively for the whale-watching excursion.

“We told our travel agent we wanted some place quiet and serene,” John Guarin said from the patio at the Oasis Hotel. “She came up with this place. We flew in at 10:30 at night and didn’t know what to expect; we were happy just to see that the toilets worked. But then I woke up and saw the sunrise and bright red streaks streaming down over (Carmen Island, 11 miles off the beach). I woke (Valerie) up and said, ‘You’ve got to see this place.’ ”

Then they went to the other side of Baja and met a few whales.

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Despite Loreto’s shortcomings, nobody can argue the fact that it is a unique city, rich in history and culture. It was founded by Juan Maria de Salvatierra, a Jesuit missionary, in 1697, becoming the first European settlement in the Californias, above and below the Mexican border.

In the middle of town sits the first of a long chain of missions stretching to Northern California. The mother of all missions, as Loreto’s is called, still is an active church and a popular stop for history buffs.

Not only missionaries from Spain, Italy and Portugal, but pirates, miners and adventurers from England and Wales visited Loreto in its early days. Few of them struck it rich, but many stayed. Names like Davis, Cunningham and Green are among the most common names in the Loreto phone book.

More recently, not long after the turn of the century and the mass production of Henry Ford’s automobiles, the Model T arrived in Loreto.

As the story goes, one of Loreto’s wealthier residents had the car delivered via ferry from the Mexican mainland. While driving the car that night, he frightened the townspeople into a near panic. They had never seen nor heard of the car and thought it was some sort of monster.

“They started running through the streets scared to death,” said Gloria Benziger, 59, a lifelong Loreto resident whose family built and still owns and operates the Oasis Hotel. “They thought the headlights were the eyes.”

A few years later, a second Model T came to town. Though there were only the two cars, they met head on one day and Loreto had its first traffic accident.

Fishermen discovered Loreto years later, and 30 or so years ago, the first hotels sprang up to accommodate them. In the winter, yellowtail swarmed around the offshore islands and off the beaches by the thousands.

Sussarrey remembers the days when he went to the end of the pier, tied a lure to some heavy line, wrapped the line around his waist and heaved the lure off the local pier. A large yellowtail would strike and “pull me all over the place.”

In the summer, dorado and sailfish--and occasionally blue and black marlin--are the prevalent catch. But in the 1980s, due to heavy pressure from sport and commercial fishermen who had little regard for future generations, fisheries suffered substantial declines.

In recent years, however, there has been a growing conservation movement among recreational fishermen and within the Mexican government, which could result in an improved situation throughout the Sea of Cortez.

Jordan Kimbriel, 33, a scuba-diving guide who moved to Loreto when he was 9, said that, despite what some people think, Mexico’s recent crackdown on long-line fishermen and the use of gill-nets in the gulf already is producing better fishing. “Now there’s a lot of bait in the water and a lot more fish,” he said. “We had two bad years, horrendous years (in 1992 and ‘93), and people wrote this place off.”

Kimbriel blamed those poor seasons on El Nino , which warmed the water in the gulf to the point where Sargasso grass, which provides cover and food for dorado when it breaks loose from the ocean floor, stopped growing. The result was little or no dorado for people who flew here.

Last year, however, the Sargasso grass grew again, and fishermen were fighting dorado from sunup to sundown. Whether that is any indication of the future for Loreto anglers remains to be seen.

But barring a complete collapse of the fishery, Loreto seems destined to remain a charming little city where time seems to stand still. “Everyone knows about Cabo, it’s Cabo, Cabo, Cabo,” Mestrin said. “Before that, it was Mazatlan. In 10 years, maybe Cabo will go the way of Mazatlan, but Loreto will still be the same unspoiled fishing village it has always been.”