SaltwateI took up fly-fishing only relatively recently and almost since that moment a fish that went straight to the top of my ‘to catch’ list was the mahi-mahi or Dorado (Coryphaena hippurus). With this in mind, last summer I booked a trip to the Baja peninsula in Mexico.
Our first day of fishing was something of a rude awakening, shattering all of my pre-conceived ideas about bluewater fly-fishing. After motoring out to the fishing grounds (picking up some live sardinas for chum en-route) the skipper slowed the boat as we aproached a relatively small area of apparently featureless sea. I then proceeded to strip off line, naively preparing myself to cast as far as possible whilst simultaneously scanning the sea for I wasn’t really sure what…
The skipper meanwhile leant into the livebait well, picked out a couple of live Sardinas and casually flicked them over the side. The moment they hit the water, several neon blue, green and gold torpedos shot in from nowhere, smashing the bait from the surface in explosions of spray and scales, no more than fifteen feet from the boat! It was at this point that I suffered a severe episode of over-excitement and adrenalin-ation, my legs turned to jelly and I spent the next three hours having to kneel, rather than stand in the boat, whilst the skipper cast me numerous quizzical glances!
This somewhat humiliating introduction to bluewater fly-fishing proved to be vastly different from my daydreams of the previous few months. A typical day saw us motor out wide towards the area where the Dorado were being caught (and trust me, this was a big area – some Americans we met came across a school of Dorado that they estimated at a square mile in size). Once we saw fish chasing bait, or came to a Fish Attracting Device (a buoy attached to the sea-bed by a substantial piece of rope), the skipper would start tossing live-baits over the side and the Gamesters would swarm in.
The next few hours would then be spent drifting with the currents, whilst anywhere up to fifty fish between 10 and 40lb shoaled closet o the boat, waiting for the next baitfish to land amongst them. It is not an overstatement that in the five days we targeted the Dorado, my fishing partner and I probably caught in the region of 150 between 8 and 35lb. When the fishing is hot in Loreto, it’s really hot! Days of 30-40 fish a day between two anglers are not uncommon and the end of the day’s charter is often signalled by exhaustion on the angler’s part, rather than running out of time!
Hooking them up on a fly was simply a case of timing the cast so that the fly landed on the water in front of an aggressive fish. Takes ranged from casual inhalations to full-blown smash and grabs so fast that striking was out of the question and line burn was a problem, even though I was wearing stripping gloves and electrical tape to protect my fingers!
The take from my biggest fish (35lb of green and gold fury) was truly spectacular. The moment my Streaker-Deceiver landed, it lit-up, shot out of the water, smashed into the fly and grey-hounded off across the surface, stripping line off the reel so fast the dye started to mist out of my backing! I swear you must have been able to hear the scream of the reel and my hollers of excitement back on dry land! Thirty exhausting minutes later I finally got it into the boat and made a vow to myself to buy a 12wt on my return to the UK (which I have now fulfilled!).
After a couple of days of filling your boots and getting used to the fishing, you actually start to get picky. Rather than just hooking up with any Dorado, by the third day I started to want only the biggest and actively targeted the big bulls hanging round the edge of the shoals, with admittedly modest success, managing three over 20lb. These big bulls can get BIG aswell , towards the end of July and I took up fly-fishing only relatively recently and almost since that moment a fish that went straight to the top of my ‘to catch’ list was the mahi-mahi or Dorado (Coryphaena hippurus). With this in mind, last summer I booked a trip to the Baja peninsula in Mexico.
Our first day of fishingI took up fly-fishing only relatively recently and almost since that moment a fish that went straight to the top of my ‘to catch’ list was the mahi-mahi or Dorado (Coryphaena hippurus). With this in mind, last summer I booked a trip to the Baja peninsula in Mexico.
Our first day of fishing was something of a rude awakening, shattering all of my pre-conceived ideas about bluewater fly-fishing. After motoring out to the fishing grounds (picking up some live sardinas for chum en-route) the skipper slowed the boat as we aproached a relatively small area of apparently featureless sea. I then proceeded to strip off line, naively preparing myself to cast as far as possible whilst simultaneously scanning the sea for I wasn’t really sure what…
The skipper meanwhile leant into the livebait well, picked out a couple of live Sardinas and casually flicked them over the side. The moment they hit the water, several neon blue, green and gold torpedos shot in from nowhere, smashing the bait from the surface in explosions of spray and scales, no more than fifteen feet from the boat! It was at this point that I suffered a severe episode of over-excitement and adrenalin-ation, my legs turned to jelly and I spent the next three hours having to kneel, rather than stand in the boat, whilst the skipper cast me numerous quizzical glances!
This somewhat humiliating introduction to bluewater fly-fishing proved to be vastly different from my daydreams of the previous few months. A typical day saw us motor out wide towards the area where the Dorado were being caught (and trust me, this was a big area – some Americans we met came across a school of Dorado that they estimated at a square mile in size). Once we saw fish chasing bait, or came to a Fish Attracting Device (a buoy attached to the sea-bed by a substantial piece of rope), the skipper would start tossing live-baits over the side and the Gamesters would swarm in.
The next few hours would then be spent drifting with the currents, whilst anywhere up to fifty fish between 10 and 40lb shoaled closet o the boat, waiting for the next baitfish to land amongst them. It is not an overstatement that in the five days we targeted the Dorado, my fishing partner and I probably caught in the region of 150 between 8 and 35lb. When the fishing is hot in Loreto, it’s really hot! Days of 30-40 fish a day between two anglers are not uncommon and the end of the day’s charter is often signalled by exhaustion on the angler’s part, rather than running out of time!
Hooking them up on a fly was simply a case of timing the cast so that the fly landed on the water in front of an aggressive fish. Takes ranged from casual inhalations to full-blown smash and grabs so fast that striking was out of the question and line burn was a problem, even though I was wearing stripping gloves and electrical tape to protect my fingers!
The take from my biggest fish (35lb of green and gold fury) was truly spectacular. The moment my Streaker-Deceiver landed, it lit-up, shot out of the water, smashed into the fly and grey-hounded off across the surface, stripping line off the reel so fast the dye started to mist out of my backing! I swear you must have been able to hear the scream of the reel and my hollers of excitement back on dry land! Thirty exhausting minutes later I finally got it into the boat and made a vow to myself to buy a 12wt on my return to the UK (which I have now fulfilled!).
After a couple of days of filling your boots and getting used to the fishing, you actually start to get picky. Rather than just hooking up with any Dorado, by the third day I started to want only the biggest and actively targeted the big bulls hanging round the edge of the shoals, with admittedly modest success, managing three over 20lb. These big bulls can get BIG aswell , towards the end of July and throughout August 40-50lb fish are relatively common and the IGFA 10kg record of 58lb came from Loreto in 1998.
If you tire of the dorado(!), there are also inshore opportunities, although these are not as prolific as further down the peninsula in the East Cape area. That said, our inshore forays saw us taking roosterfish, pargo (snapper), ladyfish and cabrilla (leopard grouper). In fact, two of the most memorable hours fishing of my life were had drifting in a panga just off a beach, casting little bucktail deceivers and poppers to a shoal of very small roosterfish and watching in glee as packs of these tenacious fighters tore in at the fly, combs erect and gills flaring. Roosterfish (particularly the big 'bubba' fish over 20lb) are high up the wish-list for the next trip to Baja.
The area also gets some incredible concentrations of billfish, which with the right conditions can be caught by casting flies directly to them (or so I am told). A month or so before we arrived in Loreto, the sailfish were so thick in numbers that the ‘conventional’ anglers were having difficulty getting a bait through them to the Dorado! Life can be tough sometimes! However the peak Dorado season sees them pushed out wide and generally out of fishing range .
If it’s Dorado that you’re after, I reckon that when the fishing is hot, Loreto offers the fly-fisherman or light-tackle angler some of, if not the best fishing anywhere in the world. If you're not as fussy and it's simply world-class fly-fishing you want, then the Baja peninsula may be the answer! Austen and myself are planning on a trip to the Baja peninsula next summer... If you think you might be interested, get in touch! - Toby Coe
was something of a rude awakening, shattering all of my pre-conceived ideas about bluewater fly-fishing. After motoring out to the fishing grounds (picking up some live sardinas for chum en-route) the skipper slowed the boat as we aproached a relatively small area of apparently featureless sea. I then proceeded to strip off line, naively preparing myself to cast as far as possible whilst simultaneously scanning the sea for I wasn’t really sure what…
The skipper meanwhile leant into the livebait well, picked out a couple of live Sardinas and casually flicked them over the side. The moment they hit the water, several neon blue, green and gold torpedos shot in from nowhere, smashing the bait from the surface in explosions of spray and scales, no more than fifteen feet from the boat! It was at this point that I suffered a severe episode of over-excitement and adrenalin-ation, my legs turned to jelly and I spent the next three hours having to kneel, rather than stand in the boat, whilst the skipper cast me numerous quizzical glances!
This somewhat humiliating introduction to bluewater fly-fishing proved to be vastly different from my daydreams of the previous few months. A typical day saw us motor out wide towards the area where the Dorado were being caught (and trust me, this was a big area – some Americans we met came across a school of Dorado that they estimated at a square mile in size). Once we saw fish chasing bait, or came to a Fish Attracting Device (a buoy attached to the sea-bed by a substantial piece of rope), the skipper would start tossing live-baits over the side and the Gamesters would swarm in.
The next few hours would then be spent drifting with the currents, whilst anywhere up to fifty fish between 10 and 40lb shoaled closet o the boat, waiting for the next baitfish to land amongst them. It is not an overstatement that in the five days we targeted the Dorado, my fishing partner and I probably caught in the region of 150 between 8 and 35lb. When the fishing is hot in Loreto, it’s really hot! Days of 30-40 fish a day between two anglers are not uncommon and the end of the day’s charter is often signalled by exhaustion on the angler’s part, rather than running out of time!
Hooking them up on a fly was simply a case of timing the cast so that the fly landed on the water in front of an aggressive fish. Takes ranged from casual inhalations to full-blown smash and grabs so fast that striking was out of the question and line burn was a problem, even though I was wearing stripping gloves and electrical tape to protect my fingers!
The take from my biggest fish (35lb of green and gold fury) was truly spectacular. The moment my Streaker-Deceiver landed, it lit-up, shot out of the water, smashed into the fly and grey-hounded off across the surface, stripping line off the reel so fast the dye started to mist out of my backing! I swear you must have been able to hear the scream of the reel and my hollers of excitement back on dry land! Thirty exhausting minutes later I finally got it into the boat and made a vow to myself to buy a 12wt on my return to the UK (which I have now fulfilled!).
After a couple of days of filling your boots and getting used to the fishing, you actually start to get picky. Rather than just hooking up with any Dorado, by the third day I started to want only the biggest and actively targeted the big bulls hanging round the edge of the shoals, with admittedly modest success, managing three over 20lb. These big bulls can get BIG aswell , towards the end of July and throughout August 40-50lb fish are relatively common and the IGFA 10kg record of 58lb came from Loreto in 1998.
If you tire of the dorado(!), there are also inshore opportunities, although these are not as prolific as further down the peninsula in the East Cape area. That said, our inshore forays saw us taking roosterfish, pargo (snapper), ladyfish and cabrilla (leopard grouper). In fact, two of the most memorable hours fishing of my life were had drifting in a panga just off a beach, casting little bucktail deceivers and poppers to a shoal of very small roosterfish and watching in glee as packs of these tenacious fighters tore in at the fly, combs erect and gills flaring. Roosterfish (particularly the big 'bubba' fish over 20lb) are high up the wish-list for the next trip to Baja.
The area also gets some incredible concentrations of billfish, which with the right conditions can be caught by casting flies directly to them (or so I am told). A month or so before we arrived in Loreto, the sailfish were so thick in numbers that the ‘conventional’ anglers were having difficulty getting a bait through them to the Dorado! Life can be tough sometimes! However the peak Dorado season sees them pushed out wide and generally out of fishing range .
If it’s Dorado that you’re after, I reckon that when the fishing is hot, Loreto offers the fly-fisherman or light-tackle angler some of, if not the best fishing anywhere in the world. If you're not as fussy and it's simply world-class fly-fishing you want, then the Baja peninsula may be the answer! Austen and myself are planning on a trip to the Baja peninsula next summer... If you think you might be interested, get in touch! - Toby Coe
throughout August 40-50lb fish are relatively common and the IGFA 10kg record of 58lb came from Loreto in 1998.
If you tire of the dorado(!), there are also inshore opportunities, although these are not as prolific as further down the peninsula in the East Cape area. That said, our inshore forays saw us taking roosterfish, pargo (snapper), ladyfish and cabrilla (leopard grouper). In fact, two of the most memorable hours fishing of my life were had drifting in a panga just off a beach, casting little bucktail deceivers and poppers to a shoal of very small roosterfish and watching in glee as packs of these tenacious fighters tore in at the fly, combs erect and gills flaring. Roosterfish (particularly the big 'bubba' fish over 20lb) are high up the wish-list for the next trip to Baja.
The area also gets some incredible concentrations of billfish, which with the right conditions can be caught by casting flies directly to them (or so I am told). A month or so before we arrived in Loreto, the sailfish were so thick in numbers that the ‘conventional’ anglers were having difficulty getting a bait through them to the Dorado! Life can be tough sometimes! However the peak Dorado season sees them pushed out wide and generally out of fishing range .
If it’s Dorado that you’re after, I reckon that when the fishing is hot, Loreto offers the fly-fisherman or light-tackle angler some of, if not the best fishing anywhere in the world. If you're not as fussy and it's simply world-class fly-fishing you want, then the Baja peninsula may be the answer! Austen and myself are planning on a trip to the Baja peninsula next summer... If you think you might be interested, get in touch! - Toby Coe
r fly fishing around Hervey Bay By Paul Dolan