Baja Fishing Adventure Remains a Nightmare

It’s often referred to as a poor man’s long-range fishing trip--and for $700 or so, you are treated to a six-day adventure unlike any other.

But there are risk factors involved in forgoing San Diego’s pricey but luxurious fleet in favor of the converted shrimp boats that run south out of San Felipe in northeastern Baja California.

That became sadly apparent on Oct. 4 when two Southland fishermen and their Mexican skiff captain failed to return to their mother ship in the remote Midriff region of the Sea of Cortez, about 350 miles south of the border.

Lorenzo Madrid, 50, of Malibu, and Joe Rangel, 50, of Riverside, and a guide the boat’s owner identified as Ramos Garcia of San Felipe, were still reported missing Thursday, eight days later.

Lorena Blanco, a spokeswoman for the American Consulate in Tijuana, said there were no immediate plans to call off a search being conducted by Mexican Coast Guard vessels, one helicopter and two airplanes, as well as by a small contingent of volunteers.

Assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard has not been requested.

“From the first day until now, nothing,” Eduardo Paralta, a volunteer pilot from the coastal town of Puerto Libertad, near Hermosillo on Mexico’s mainland, said Wednesday afternoon. “I fly for four days and nothing.”

Bobby Castellon, owner of the 87-foot mother ship Celia Angelina, was aboard the vessel during the fishing trip and remained in the area for several days, helping the search effort.

Upon his return to San Felipe before dawn Thursday, Castellon answered a voice-mail request for an interview with this voice-mail response: “We spent seven days searching and . . . nothing. Not one piece of flotation. No cushion. No life vests. No ice chests. No plastic. Nothing. I don’t know what happened to them.”

Castellon was reached briefly Thursday evening and would only say that “I’m a broken man” and vowed to return to the area and keep looking “until we find something.”

Asked to verify the guide’s name, which had previously been released by the San Felipe Police Department as Felipe de Jesus Ramos Garcia, he said he could not, but confirmed that there were two Garcias on the vessel, that they were brothers and that one of them was on the missing skiff.

The Celia Angelina remains detained in San Felipe, Blanco said. She also said that rumors of two bodies being recovered and brought back aboard the vessel were false. A police investigation is underway.

The Midriff, where nutrient-rich water from the north mixes with warmer currents of the south, creating superb fishing conditions, is notorious for strong winds that often come up unexpectedly.

Gene Kira of San Diego, a popular author of Baja-related books and an avid fisherman, was in the area at the same time aboard another mother ship, the Jose Andres, skippered by Tony Reyes Jr. Kira said the Celia Angelina was anchored at Puerto Refugio at the northern end of 40-mile-long Isla Angel De La Guarda, or Guardian Angel Island, when the three men failed to return from an afternoon of fishing.

The Jose Andres was about 40 miles south.

“It was a little windy that day, but nothing out of the ordinary,” Kira said. “I’d say it was a steady northeast breeze. There were whitecaps, but it wasn’t what I would call a bad wind at all. We were fishing in it.”

The Midriff region, beyond the shores of the small Baja town of Bahia de los Angeles, consists of several uninhabited islands. Only a few San Felipe-based vessels make the 16-hour run to the area, where they hop from island to island, anchoring in protected areas and acting as home base for the outboard-powered pangas.

The fishermen stay close to the islands while targeting mostly seabass, snapper and yellowtail. But they occasionally motor into deeper water to fish for giant grouper.

The panga captains keep an eye on each other as best they can, but with so many points and small bays, that’s difficult.

Most carry radios but rarely use them and the radios don’t always work.

It is purely conjecture, but the panga carrying Madrid and Rangel might have lost the use of its outboard in water too deep to anchor and simply drifted with the current. The gulf is vast and the adjacent mainland and Baja coasts are largely desolate and deserted.

The panga might also have capsized but if it did, it seems, the search would have turned up some sort of debris.

“It’s very mysterious,” Kira said.

Gustavo Velez, who owns the 105-foot Erik and has been running trips to the Midriff for more than 20 years, said commercial fishermen have disappeared from the area but he has never heard of sportfishing clients being lost for so long.

“We’ve had boats capsize but we always saved the fishermen,” he added.

Velez also said that he runs trips only through September because October is often too rough and because the good panga captains use the fall months to go shrimping in the San Felipe area.

Kira said that Reyes learned Celia Angelina’s panga was missing via radio call late the same night or early the next morning (Thursday, Oct. 5).

The Jose Andreas had begun traveling north and pulled alongside the Celia Angelina later that day.

The next morning, the Jose Andres transferred some of its fuel to the Celia Angelina, which transferred its passengers to the Jose Andres for the return trip to San Felipe.

Kira said Castellon told him he had sent two pangas to look for the fishermen when night fell on Oct. 4 and they had not returned.

One lost a prop in the rocks so Castellon called off the search.

The next morning, while searching with pangas and the mother ship, Castellon used a radio and cellular phone and “called everyone he could think of” to request assistance, but none came until a day later.

Blanco said she was told by Mexican authorities that the search was begun immediately after Thursday’s call for assistance. Kira, however, said that he didn’t see signs of an outside rescue attempt until Friday morning.

“On Friday morning, we saw the first plane come over about 8:30 a.m., a medium-sized plane from the north,” he said. “Then we saw two more that morning. And then we got back to Refugio at 10:30 and that’s when Celia transferred its passengers to us. We got back to San Felipe about 3 a.m. [last] Saturday morning.”

The search continues, leaving in its wake strained emotions among relatives north of the border.

Jack Frost, a Riverside attorney and longtime friend of Rangel’s, said Rangel’s family is “just devastated” and also frustrated that Mexico has not requested help from the United States.

Madrid’s wife, Janice, expressed similar sentiments when reached for a brief phone interview.

She said she has been afraid to leave the house, fearing she might miss a call from someone with news.

“Not knowing what happened to them is the hardest part,” she said. “I sit down and try to eat dinner but I keep thinking of those poor guys out there . . . “

HOT BITES

* Local: The midweek storm might have slowed the yellowfin tuna bite, but it failed to drive all the fish south to warmer water. There remain offshore areas where the water is holding at 68 degrees, and that’s where the fish are being found.

Said DFG biologist Steve Crooke, “They do need the warmer water to come in, but as long as there’s plenty for them to eat, they’ll stick around until the water drops to about 66 degrees.”

One more cold snap ought to take care of that.

* Cabo San Lucas: The tournament season is at hand and on cue with the arrival of blue marlin. Conditions are prime, with beautiful blue water in the low 80s, and the bigger blues cannot be far behind the smaller ones now being caught. Most of the blues being released are in the 300-pound range, which doesn’t excite tournament anglers.

Top catch, however, was a 700-pound black marlin caught aboard Eagle I.

* East Cape-La Paz: Tuna and dorado are in this area en masse, and the biggest problem for fishermen is knowing when to stop keeping and start releasing.

Said Gary Graham of Baja on the Fly, “Use a fly tied with a pearl angel-hair body, chartreuse angel-hair back and black angel-hair on top, cast out on a 300-grain shooting head, let it sink to a five-count, strip and hang on for dear life because chances are you will be attached to 20 pounds of pure muscle headed straight for the bottom.”

* Morro Bay: This week’s storm kept the Virg’s Landing vessels in on Wednesday, but they were back out Thursday, trying to find schools of albacore scattered by strong winds.

Two boats met with moderate success but the big news was that the winds had subsided and the swell was dropping.

WILD FILE

* A mother bear and her two cubs, having become habituated to human food given to them by construction workers in the Meeks Bay area of Lake Tahoe, were tracked and killed recently by Department of Fish and Game wildlife experts.

As people moved into the homes, the bears continued looking for food, and in many cases broke into the homes to get it. Finally, a resident armed with a depredation permit shot the mother bear as it was trying to tear off a piece of plywood used to cover a hole made by the bear on a previous raid.

The injured bear ran into the woods, was tracked and “put down” along with her cubs who were deemed “well beyond rehabilitation.”

* In other bear news, a Shasta County man recently began serving a three-year, eight-month prison sentence for mistreating a bear he’d trapped in the summer of 1999 and tried to hold until the opening of archery season.

Thomas Leroy Bishop, 48, pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty and illegally taking a bear.

DFG wardens found the 200-pound bear in a steel culvert trap, where it had spent eight days in sweltering heat, living in its filth.

The dehydrated animal gulped four gallons of water before it was turned loose.

WINDING UP

The 48th annual California RV Show, which runs today through Oct. 22 at Fairplex in Pomona, is offering an added incentive to male show-goers 40 or older: free prostate cancer screenings.

The screenings are part of a cooperative agreement between RV-maker Thor Industries and various medical groups, notably the Cancer Research Institute.

Show hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and free for children under 12. Discount coupons are available at https://www.carvshow.com. Details: (909) 274-9215.