Everything worth catching off the tip of Baja in late August is living under garbage. Not literal garbage, most days, though a floating pallet has made more anglers happy down there than any lure ever designed. What you are actually hunting is structure that drifts: a weed line of golden sargassum lying across the blue like somebody spilled it, a log, a length of net, a piece of somebody else problem that broke loose upcurrent a month ago. Find the shade, find the little baitfish hiding in the shade, and you find the dorado eating the little baitfish.
The run out of Cabo starts before the town has gone to bed, which is a scheduling conflict the town seems fine with. You clear the arch in the dark with the rocks looming up on the right and the sea lions complaining, and then you point south and go, and for an hour there is nothing to do but drink coffee and watch the mate rig ballyhoo with a patience nobody on our side of the boat possessed. Then the sun comes up on water so blue it looks dyed, and the whole day turns into a search for one specific thing.
Our captain found it around nine in the morning by following frigate birds, which is the oldest fish finder there is and still the best one. The weed line ran maybe two hundred yards, thick and gold and lifting on the swell. He idled up to it, made one pass along the edge, and the short rigger got smashed. Then the long one. Then a fish came up and ate a bait right at the transom in full view of everybody, and the mate started throwing live bait in the water with one hand and handing rods out with the other, and for about eleven minutes the back of that boat was pure disorder.
A dorado lit up is the single most ridiculous color scheme in the ocean. Electric green, hard yellow, blue spots that look painted on by somebody showing off, and the whole thing shifts and pulses while the fish is in the air, which is where a dorado spends a meaningful percentage of the fight. They jump, they run sideways, they come at the boat faster than you can crank, and they change their minds constantly. Our biggest was a bull with a forehead like a cinder block that took a bait, went airborne four times, and then swam directly under the hull because that is the sort of thing it wanted to do.
We kept four and let the rest go, which is the arrangement everybody down there has settled on, and the mate cut a piece off one and made ceviche in a bowl before we had even cleared the weed line. Lime, salt, a serrano, and a fish that had been alive twenty minutes earlier. Nobody spoke for a while. Then somebody asked what we were doing tomorrow, and the captain, who had already turned the boat, said we would find some more garbage.
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