Fish Give Skipper Something to Talk About

It is an obscure record and certainly an unofficial one, but it is a record a local skipper is likely to hold for a long time and one he probably will never live down.

After all, not many others will be able to say they hooked and landed a gringo.

The Mexican skipper, as the story goes, had put his trolling lures out where he shouldn’t have: beyond the famous rock arches signifying Land’s End, an area popular among divers and snorkelers.

The hookup was almost immediate. The fisherman, a passenger on the boat, innocently went into battle, pumping and reeling, thinking he had a large grouper at the end of his line.

Half an hour later, however, he reeled to the surface a bubble-blowing, very irate scuba diver who had been hooked in the wetsuit in a part of his back he couldn’t reach.

The diver, like many game fish these days, was carefully released and left to simmer in the cool, clear water from which he was pulled.

The skipper left for deeper water, a little embarrassed and well aware that this dubious catch would become his claim to fame, like it or not.

“It was the biggest diver ever caught in Cabo,” says a smiling Guillermo “Memo” Gamio, 45, manager of a small independent fleet. “A world-record . . . like a 250-pound diver.”

*

Gamio, who spends his days at the marina trying to talk tourists into fishing on his boats, says the story about the aforementioned skipper is only one of many floating around this bustling resort city.

The waters offshore are among the liveliest in the world--teeming with fish and fishermen, he adds. One never knows what to expect come the return of the fleets each afternoon.

Asked, then, to conjure up a couple of other stories, Gamio crosses his arms, thinks for a moment, then begins speaking in the best English he can manage, about an angry blue marlin that once attacked a 52-foot yacht.

“They go to Gordo Bank and hook a huge blue marlin, 500-600 pounds,” he says. “They fight it, fight it, fight it . . . but the blue marlin, when he feels he’s lost, instead of fighting he attacks the boat. They should have gone full throttle, but they just stay there.

“This fish jumps inside the boat and everybody runs up deck to get out of the way. The fish starts going farther inside, gets into the cabin, is smashing everything. Then it went backward, smashed the fighting chair . . . makes a real mess, of the bait container and everything. And then, unbelievable, the fish jumped inside of the water again, and took the rod, the reel . . . everything.

“When I saw the boat coming in I said, ‘What the hell, what happened to these guys?’ So I went and talked to these guys, and they said, ‘Ahh, that . . . fish wanted to kill us.’ ”

Gamio, obviously not the busiest fleet manager in town, is certainly one of the most talkative. He goes on about two couples who met for the first time at the docks and decided to share the cost of Gamio’s boat.

“They went out and suddenly a fish strikes, and then the guys start arguing over who gets to fight the fish,” he says. “And they start fighting with fists, each other. They didn’t care about the fish . . . Pow! Pow! Pow!

“The skipper says, ‘Hey, man, take it easy. If you don’t take it easy, I go back.’ And they keep fighting so he turned the boat around. It’s what, maybe half past 7 in the morning. They call me by the radio and say, ‘I’m coming back! Get the Marines ready! These guys are crazy; they’re fighting all over and destroying everything in sight.’

“So my skipper parks the boat here in the dock, they get out of the boat. They had stopped, but when they get onto the ground they start up again. The girls are going, ‘Oh stop, stop. . . .’

“So the Marines grab them and throw them in jail. They had to pay for what they destroyed. They should have just flipped a coin [to determine who got to fight the first fish].”

A couple of tourists walk past Gamio en route to the open-air market adjacent to the marina and he ends the story. Competition is fierce, he says, and rushes off to greet the tourists with the usual, “You want to go fishing tomorrow?”

*

In the middle of town, under the heat of a mid-morning sun a mile or so from the fishing docks, Minerva Smith is stocking her tackle store shelves with colorful lures.

Having been here 20 years she surely must have a story or two to share.

Yes, she says, recalling a recent incident involving a man who landed a marlin while having a heart attack.

“It was aboard the Reel Affair two months ago,” she says. “Jim Brown was fishing with Dick Landfield, who has a home here. They’re out fishing, they get hooked up.

“He starts saying, ‘I don’t feel good.’ He’s on this fish and they’re calling him a wimp and telling him he’s got to get the fish in. They actually make him get the fish in--and he’s having a heart attack!

“They radio in to have an ambulance meet the boat. They don’t even worry. And then once they’ve got the fish landed and everything’s fine they get him to shore and there’s a Red Cross ambulance waiting.

“They take him to Dr. Hernandez. They call me from the hospital and say they [don’t speak Spanish and] can’t [communicate with] Dr. Hernandez. I get on the phone and say, ‘Yes, what’s wrong?’ He says, ‘Minerva, this gentleman has had a heart attack. I want him air-[evacuated] out of here!’ And I say ‘Oh, my God!’

“I get back on with the owner of the boat and he tells me, ‘Well, we landed the fish.’ ”

Up the street at another tackle store, Los Cabos Fishing Center, Jeff Klassen is organizing his merchandise.

Asked about any bizarre happenings he might have experienced in his six years here, he says one stands out, involving a meteor that came reasonably close to sinking his boat while on a fishing trip three years ago.

“It was the middle of the day and all I saw was a super bright light--it looked more like a chrome ball,” he says. “We just sat there and watched it. We didn’t know what it was. It was probably the size of a basketball when it hit, and that thing had to be going a million miles an hour when it hit. It made a huge splash and left a big plume of smoke.”

Another time, Klassen says, he was almost dropped by a flying blowfish, sort of.

“I was at Gordo Point, standing on the edge of this cliff, and all of a sudden something comes flying past my ear, and there’s this big thud. I could feel the breeze. . . . I look down and all I saw was this blowfish on the sand, a big sucker a foot around with all these spines and stuff.

“So I look up and there’s this frigate bird up there. What this thing did was it saw this blowfish on the surface when it was deflated, swooped down and picked it up and then he went up in the air and the thing inflated so the bird dropped it, and it almost beaned me. It missed me by about a foot. One of these days. . . .”

Down the street, on a busy corner on the main drag, in the Pisces Fleet office, Lance Vallery, a partner in the real estate business with Pisces owner Marco Ehrenberg, brings up the time he went out to catch a dorado for dinner and instead hooked up with what might have been the biggest marlin ever caught off Land’s End.

The fish, estimated to be 19 feet long and weighing 1,200 pounds--a conservative estimate judging from a picture on the wall showing the broad-shouldered marlin blasting out of water--dragged Vallery and a friend for several hours, more than 25 miles into the Sea of Cortez.

When they finally got the massive billfish alongside their small skiff they realized it was bigger than their boat. They cut the line and began the long trip back.

Marco’s wife, Tracy, gesturing toward a picture of her and three girlfriends posing at the stern of the boat, points to her ex-sister-in-law, Sandra, and says she battled a bucket for nearly half-an-hour.

“Three of us had caught marlin and she hadn’t caught anything,” Tracy Ehrenberg says. “So we ran the bucket down her line when she wasn’t looking. She battled it for 25 minutes, thinking it was a tuna. And she smacked me when she realized it wasn’t.”

*

Back at the docks, the boats are beginning to return, most flying flags indicating a successful day. A large dorado is unloaded. A small marlin is hoisted onto the scale. Weary fishermen are glad to be back on solid ground.

Gamio is milling about, asking who they are fishing with tomorrow.

But he’s not through telling stories. There is the time he and panga skipper Alberto Acosta pulled an all-nighter before going out and winning a local small-game tournament worth $5,000.

“The tournament started at 6 o’clock, and we went to bed at half-past-three,” he says. “We were drinking in the whorehouse with the girls. The take-off point was from Las Palmas restaurant. It was a bad day, clouds, winds, and big waves, up to 15-20 feet.

“We got a late start so we went 2 1/2 hours at full speed. The whole boat was jumping out of the water, the engine and everything. I said, ‘We are going to kill ourselves,’ and [Acosta] says, ‘I don’t care.’

“Anyway, we get into a school of dorados, I was in a terrible hangover. But we caught three or four dorados, one of them a big bull dorado. And then we found porpoise and a school of tunas. Acosta fought big one for 20 minutes and the line broke.

“There was just enough time to get back and beat the deadline. So we went another 2 1/2 hours nonstop at full speed and we got the bull dorado on the scale just in time. It weighed [45 pounds] and we won the tournament by one pound.”

That sure is a lot of bull.