October is the month La Paz keeps for itself. The summer crowds are gone, the hurricanes have mostly stopped threatening, and the Sea of Cortez is still eighty-some degrees and full of the sardina the dorado followed up the coast in June. Down the beach at La Ventana the pangas launch straight off the sand at dawn, twenty-two feet of fiberglass with a sixty-horse outboard and a captain who has been reading this water since he was old enough to hold a bait bucket. There is no fighting chair. There is a cooler to sit on, a bucket of live sardina, and the long blue shape of Cerralvo Island across the channel.
My captain was a man named Lupe who said about forty words all day and every one of them was necessary. We stopped at the bait panga first, where a kid scooped sardina into our tank with a net and was paid in pesos and cigarettes, and then ran south along the island looking for birds. Dorado in October hold under anything that floats. A sargasso mat, a palm frond, a chunk of rope, a dead sea turtle, which we found, and which had a dozen fish under it that lit up neon green and gold the second the first sardina hit the water.
You fish them on light spinning tackle with a live bait on a small hook and no weight, and the bite is not subtle. The first fish went forty yards in about two seconds, came out of the water three times in a row like a thrown knife, and then did it all again on the way to the boat. Dorado are the most beautiful fish in the ocean for exactly as long as they are in the water, and then they turn the color of an old nickel and you understand why the captains want them in the box fast. Lupe had mine iced before I had finished saying anything about it.
We took five fish between fifteen and twenty-five pounds and released a dozen smaller ones, and then the turtle drifted off and so did the school, and Lupe ran back to the island and found another mat and we did it again. A frigatebird followed us most of the morning, which Lupe said was good luck and also a thief. By noon the wind came up off the island as it does every day in La Ventana, the kiteboarders came out, and we ran home on the swell with the cooler full and the bait tank empty.
On the beach Lupe cleaned the catch on the bow of the panga with a line of pelicans standing by like they had tickets. I asked him what the secret was to dorado in October. He said, in Spanish, the secret is to be here in October. Then he said that part was free and the fish were not.
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