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.