Picachos sits about an hour and a half up out of Mazatlan, past the sugarcane and then up into brown hills with cattle standing on every bank like they are waiting for a bus. It is a young lake. The dam went in, the water came up over the brush and the fence lines and a couple of roads, and the tilapia moved in and did what tilapia do, which is turn into bass at an alarming rate. The first time you see it in the dark with mist coming off it, it looks like a modest place. It is not.
The panga leaves the dock at five thirty and the guide runs it hard along the shoreline for eight minutes with no light at all, which is a thing you decide to be fine with. Then he cuts the motor next to a stand of drowned mesquite, hands over a rod with a walking bait on it, and says one word, which is despacio. Slow. Everything you know about working a topwater fast goes over the side. Walk it, pause it, let the rings spread, walk it again. Then the whole surface of the lake opens up under it like somebody dropped a cinder block.
The first hour is not really fishing so much as it is arithmetic. Two pounds, three pounds, two and a half, a four, another two. They are thick and short and violently healthy, and they jump every single time, and by seven thirty your forearm is done and the count has gotten away from you. Nobody in the boat is talking about size. There is a specific joy in a lake that just says yes over and over, and anyone who tells you they are above it has not had a morning like that in a while.
Our guide, a young man from a village on the north arm who had been running the lake since he was fifteen, kept a small notebook of where the brush piles were and would not let anyone photograph a page of it. Around eight he moved us out to a point nobody else was working and switched everyone to something bigger and uglier, and the bites went from every cast to every fifteen minutes, which felt like a punishment until it was not. He said the little ones are for fun and the point is for the one you tell people about.
She came up under a big plastic worm in about nine feet, took it sideways, and went straight into the brush, and the two seconds where nothing moves and everyone stops breathing lasted considerably longer than two seconds. Eight pounds and change on the guide scale, back in the water inside a minute, and she left a wake going out that was frankly rude about it. On the drive back down the hill we did the thing everyone does after a lake like that, which is start pricing a return trip out loud while pretending to look out the window.