Fishing

Rocky Point

After sampling the wonderful off shore fishing out of Mazatlan, by the spring of 1972, I had found another salt water fishing paradise, “South of the Border, Down Mexico Way”. The upper end of El Golfo, the Gulf of California, the final destination of the western Colorado River, the same river that roars through the Grand Canyon, meekly trickles into the top end of El Golfo at San Felipe, Mexico. Sixty miles southeast of San Felipe is Puerto Penasco, or Rocky Point, as the local Arizonans called it.

Yes, local Arizonans. At the time, because of the outstanding fishing and relaxing available, about a hundred families had established an American colony there. The beach houses were minimum standard, but sufficient for occasional use by their lessors. Back then Gringos couldn’t own property in Mexico, so I chose to set up my tent and camp on the deserted beaches. The two best facilities at Rocky Point were the boat storage area, patrolled by the local police and fenced with concertina wire and the boat launching equipment.

My boat, at the time, was an eighteen foot, tri hull, with two, sixty horse outboards and two internal, twenty four gallon gas tanks, or as the locals called it “Beeg Texas Boat”. Loaded out it would cruise at twenty-five miles per hour and had a range of over sixty miles. We caught some very nice fish, sea bass, grouper, corvina, snook, bonefish and queen trigger fish. I won a category of a tournament there in 1973 with a ten pound, trigger fish and once saw, and came within twenty feet ,of a fifty foot, whale!

An unusual feature of Rocky Point is the extreme tidal fluctuation caused by its location at the top of El Golfo, which is several hundred miles long and for a large body of water, very narrow, fifty to a hundred miles wide. Tidal pressure going in and out causes wide fluctuations at Rocky Point. I was told the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, is the only spot in the world with greater tidal fluctuation.

Hill Country Happenings

What Is A Melanistic Deer

A melanistic deer is a white tail deer that is almost black. This condition is caused by an excess of melanism pigment and the genetic cause is unknown.

Dr. John Baccus is the director of the wildlife ecology program at Texas State University, located in San Marcos, Texas, and has been studying melanistic deer for over 13 years. He says, “Central Texas has more of these unusual deer than anywhere else.”

Funny he would say that! Last Thursday afternoon, my son, Randy, who, by the way, lives in San Marcos, was out doing his afternoon run/walk in his neighborhood and excitedly called me and said, “Dad, there’s a melanistic deer right ahead of me!”

He took these two pictures of the unusual deer and sent them to me.

On my August 2nd post I mentioned the rain that we have had and that the rest of our great State was suffering under a class four drought. Just take a look at the yards in San Marcos. The grass looks dead, the trees are hanging on and those folks down there are in trouble!

Hill Country Happenings

Morning Walk, July 31, 2009

Rain on Wednesday and Thursday morning mornings washed out on my morning walks. We had almost one and a half inches total. While the rest of our great State is suffering through a class four drought, this year we have already exceeded our yearly total and late fall and winter are our “rainy season”.

Friday’s walk produced pictures of six different does, but no horns or fawns.

The first one was just as I left my driveway and when I took the “shot”, in the distance another one popped up.

Looking to my right another was checking me out and within three hundred yards another one                        

 
Then walking back to my house and passing my hog trap, which was baited, but empty, there were two does behind it. One was almost hidden by the underbrush.

These early morning walks are fun, seeing so much wildlife is neat and, just think, it is even a healthful thing to do!

Random Thoughts

El Shrimp Bucket

Being a good Texas boy, my only exposure to Mexico had been to the sleezy border towns and now to see the budding metropolis of Mazatlan, its traffic, 500,000 inhabitants, beautiful harbor and recent awakening to Gringo tourists, was a real eye opener.

My first trip’s accommodations were at the Playa Mazatlan, the “primo” spot in town. Right on the beach, clean rooms, but no air conditioning and once you got past the night sounds of Mexico, music, horns, laughter and the roaring surf, you slept like a log.

Sleeping in the first morning “south of the border”, getting up and renting a “Yeep”, a Volkswagen Monster, we headed south from the Playa Mazatlan to the harbor to set up a fishing trip. On the way to the harbor, on the left, as we rounded a slow curve, there, on the corner of the first floor of a multi story building, was “El shrimp Bucket”. “I’ve got to stop there,” I shouted, did a “uwey” and parked right in front.

There was a big patio inside the building, like the atriums we have now in our prime office spaces, and to the left was “El Shrimp Bucket”. Little did I know that the patio was part of the restaurant, but twelve years later I would witness a very strange display in that very patio, which is, as they say, another story.

Entering and picking a booth with an ocean view, I checked the menu. A bucket of shrimp for $4.95US and since it was 10:45 AM, why not eat an early lunch. Lunch was served and mine was a full bucket of fried shrimp, not as good as Christie’s in Houston, but probably the second best. Fried onion rings and Guacamole was brought out separately and washed down with Margaritas, was a true feast!

As we were leaving, I noticed a picture of John Wayne hanging over the door and he had signed the picture, as best I remember, “Best shrimp ever! Duke”.

El Shrimp Bucket became my headquarters in Mazatlan too, but I never saw “Duke” there

Hill Country Happenings

Morning Walk, July 27, 2009

All this week there’s a good chance of rain for our County and Monday morning greeted me with a mugginess that I thought I had left behind on the Gulf Coast!

Quickly breaking a sweat, but soldering on with my walk, I came upon this doe tucked back in the thick stuff. She sat still for one “shot”, but vamoosed quickly
Keeping up a steady pace, scanning the brush on both sides of the County Road, I glanced down and there was a big snake track crossing the road, probably a big king or rattler.

Stopping, my search of both sides of the road turned up no snakes but it’s easily seen that this was a big one. My shoe tracks are beside the heel size rock.

Each day I check my butt pack and make sure that my camera, cell phone and .22, kit gun are there. Before the summer is over, I bet that I’ll run across this snake again and if it’s a rattler, curtains for it!

Hill Country Happenings

Morning Walk, July 25, 2009

Walking each morning in the before sunrise coolness is fun, healthful and something that I look forward to, but on Saturday, jackpot! I walked up on a real nice buck still in velvet!

This “shot” captured him sensing me and turning sideways.

 
Now he saw me and on this “shot” he has turned facing me.

What a nice deer!

Fishing

Mazatlan

In January of 1971, I was transferred to Phoenix and by the summer we were settled in, involved with the local Little League and hearing about two exciting get away spots in Mexico – Rocky Point and Mazatlan.

We chose Mazatlan as our first destination. At the time it was a quaint old town (now over a million inhabitants) located on the mainland directly across the mouth of El Golfo, the Gulf of California, from Cabo San Lucas. Back then, Cabo hadn’t been developed and commercial flights were few and only by Mexican airlines and a person would fly into Mazatlan and then catch the ferry to Cabo San Lucas.

On our first few trips to Mazatlan, we chose the train, the Ferrocarril Del Norte (Iron Horse Of The North), and caught it in Nogales, Mexico, right across the border from Nogales, Arizona. It was a twelve hour, plus or minus, overnight trip that deposited us in Mazatlan the next morning. Shopping and partying were the “sports” of most, but for me it was the fishing.

At the time, the only charter service was Bill Heimpel Star Fleet, also called Flota Mazatlan. They had twenty-six to thirty-two foot cabin boats as shown in the background of the photograph. The boats were seaworthy and reliable, the Captains put you on the fish, but with only one drawback, you had to keep all fish caught. Those not claimed by the fisherman, including the sailfish, were given or sold to the locals. My last visit in 1983 this practice had changed to almost all catch and release.

On my first trip out with Flota Mazatlan we raised fifteen sails, landed seven and returned to the dock with five. The picture shows two of the sailfish. I have caught sails, dolphin (not Flipper), white marlin and raised a large blue marlin and lost it. I was on a boat that landed a two hundred pound blue. I made eight trips down and always wanted to try the “small fishing”, but the excellent fare offshore always lured me away.

This picture from my last trip, shot into the sun, shows a billfish, tail walking across a very calm, Pacific Ocean. This one was released!

Pictures

More Outdoors Pictures, July 23, 2009

Warren Blesh, owner of RRR Ranch in Mills County, Texas sent me this picture of a monster buck “caught” by his Stealth Cam. The “shot” was taken at 10:12 PM on July 12 and the temperature was still 90 degrees!

Randy Pfaff sent me this picture of a monster pike attacking a hooked, smaller one. Supposedly the lucky angler landed both fish?

Ancestry

Looking Back

When I was a youngster my Dad made sure that I spent a lot of time with his family on their farm outside of Marlin in Falls County, Texas. At that time, prior to WW II, rural farmers and ranchers in Texas didn’t have electricity, propane or butane. The Rural Electrification Agency didn’t arrive in Falls County until after the war.

Looking back I remember helping my Dad, draw water from the hand dug well and haul it the two hundred yards to the house. I remember filling the lanterns with coal oil. I remember the smokehouse with hams hanging around the vent hole in the tin roof and salt pork curing.

I remember us chopping fire wood for Grandma Bryan’s cook stove. If the pieces were too big she would send us both back out to re-split the wood with a stern command, “John H. and Jon, you know that those pieces are too big. Get yourselves back outside and do it right!” But the cobblers, fresh bread and rolls couldn’t be duplicated now. She was a magician with her wood stove! I remember her making lye soap in a huge black kettle and when it cooled washing my hands with it.

I remember finding my first arrowhead and looking around to be sure there weren’t any howling, Comanches around. I remember the first fish I caught in Pool Creek, bordering Grandma’s place. I remember the first covey of quail, exploding out of the fence line behind the peach orchard and how the whirr of their wings scared me, but how calm and sure my Dad and his brother, Roy, were when they were shooting them.

I remember my Dad patiently training me to shoot my first rifle, a Remington, Model 510, Targetmaster. I still have the old rifle and have trained two generation of Bryan children to shoot with it.

I remember climbing up into the peach trees and eating my fill of fresh, ripe peaches. I remember, as a lad of six, sneaking into Tom Norwood’s melon patch and appropriating one, almost as big as me. I remember the sting of the bull nettle that I ran into as I was hurriedly leaving the area.

I remember the outside toilet, a two holer complete with a Sears catalog, and having to check for black widows before you sat down. When you finished you had to drop a hand shovel full of lime through the hole on to the “pile”. A thankless job was cleaning out the outhouse! I don’t remember ever doing that chore.

Hill Country Happenings

Morning Walk, July 17, 2009

Heading east on my Thursday walk produced no pictures or, other than the beautiful scenery, anything of note. However, my walk on Friday, after a nice dawn shower, was interesting to say the least.

Having owned this property for fifteen years, walking around it for five of those and being the next to last stop on the Star Mail Route, I had paid no attention to the five mail boxes that represented the last stop on County Roads 406 and 408. The five boxes are for ranches located on both roads, the most distant, being on the Colorado River, five miles away.

Someone in the past had constructed this unusual appliance to make the mail delivery easier. The base is a truck tire rim, the stem is a drill pipe and the mail box holder is a wagon wheel. Star Routes are bid on and “owned” by private contractors and I bet the U.S Postal Service hasn’t ever approved this contraption!

Heading south on this walk takes me by the horse pasture, where, last week, one had jumped the fence and was happily grazing along the road until I scared it back inside. The fence is still almost down and the horses could easily jump it.

While his buddies were grazing, this horse, the fence jumper, saw me coming and never took its eyes off of me. He knew that this crazy man would probably raise his arms, let out a yell and scare him again!

Bits and Pieces from Jon H Bryan…