Lake El Salto sits in the foothills behind Mazatlán, a reservoir the state of Sinaloa put in during the eighties by damming a river and letting the water come up over a valley full of mesquite and thornwood. Nobody cut the trees down first. Forty years later a good part of that forest is still standing out there under the surface, gray trunks poking up in rows where a hillside used to be, and every one of them is a piece of structure with a largemouth bass living under it. It is the most productive-looking water our crew has ever been genuinely afraid to cast into.
The reason the bass grow the way they do is tilapia. The lake is full of them, the water almost never gets cold enough to slow anything down, and a bass down there eats year round while its cousins in Ohio are sulking under the ice. What that adds up to is a fish with a head the size of a coffee can and a belly that hangs. Nobody in Sinaloa is impressed by a four pounder. They will net it for you politely, the way you would compliment somebody’s child.
We fished with a panguero out of one of the camps who has been running the same aluminum boat since before some of us had driver’s licenses, and who navigates that flooded forest with no electronics and no apparent effort, at speed, in the half dark. He does not name spots. He put us on a point at first light, watched us both throw at the open water beyond the timber, and let it go on for about ten minutes before he said, "Los árboles." The trees. Then he turned the boat sideways so that throwing anywhere else would have been rude.
Casting into standing timber requires you to accept that some of your tackle is not coming home. That is the toll. The strike, when it happened, was a heavy thump right against a trunk, and the fish did what every one of them does, which is turn and go around the tree at a dead sprint. The panguero had the boat moving before anybody said anything, right up on top of the wood, and the correct technique at that point is to stick the rod tip down into the water, walk your line around the trunk, and hope. We got about half of them that way, which he seemed to consider generous.
The big one came at maybe eight in the morning, a broad green fish with a mouth you could have posted a letter in, and she came up out of the timber shaking her head hard enough to throw water on the gunwale. Photo, quick measure, back down into the trees she went. Our guide said something we did not catch and then said "otra vez" and pointed at the exact same trunk, which had apparently not run out of fish. Out there, the tackle you lose is not a cost, it is a tip you leave for the forest.