Nobody books a trip to Mexico for the machaca. They book Cabo for marlin or Sinaloa for bass, and then somebody at the bar mentions a river down in Chiapas where the fish eat figs, and a certain kind of person cannot let that go. That was us in early September, four hours past the last paved road, standing in the Lacanjá with the jungle closed over the top of the water like a roof.
The machaca is a silver, deep bodied fish with a mouth full of blunt teeth and a habit that makes no sense until you watch it happen. The trees along these rivers drop fruit and seeds into the current all day long, and the machaca hold in the shade underneath them waiting on it. So you do not fish the seams or the tailouts. You fish the branches. You pick a gap in the canopy about the size of a dinner plate, put a popper through it on a sidearm cast, and let it sit there in the shadow while something below decides whether it is a fig.
The eat is not subtle. The fly disappears in a boil and the fish is already in the air, and machaca jump like they are being paid by the foot. They also have a mouth roughly as soft as a coffee mug, so the first three you hook come off, and the fourth cuts you off on the teeth because you got lazy about the bite tippet. We went through a lot of poppers. Most of them are still up in the trees along a two mile stretch of that river, which I have chosen to think of as a contribution to future generations.
September is the wrong month and the right month at the same time. It rains, and when it rains hard the Lacanjá turns the color of coffee with milk and nothing happens for a day. But the water drops fast in that country, and there is a window on the back side of a storm where the river clears from the top down and everything in it is hungry. Our guide, a man who fished this water with a hand line as a kid and now owns three fly rods he treats like church furniture, spent every morning looking at the sky instead of the river, and he was right every single time.
We caught maybe a dozen fish between us, none of them over four pounds, in a river with no name recognition, no lodge, no cell service and no chance of ending up on anybody’s wall. Best fishing of the year. I have stopped trying to explain it to the marlin crowd.
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