Lake El Salto is a reservoir in the hills of Sinaloa, about an hour and a half north of Mazatlán, and it was built to water fields. Somebody stocked it with Florida strain largemouth in the eighties, and the bass found a lake with no winter, a tilapia buffet and a forest of drowned trees to live in. It has been producing ten pound fish ever since with the regularity of a bakery. You fly to Mazatlán, a van picks you up, and by the next morning you are in a boat before the sun with a guide who has seen bigger fish than you ever will.
My guide was a quiet man I will call Chuy, who had the whole lake memorized the way a cab driver knows a city. October is the end of the rainy season there and the lake was up into the brush, which Chuy said was good and bad. Good because the fish were shallow, bad because every cast landed in a tree. He handed me a ten inch plastic worm in a color he called watermelon, rigged weedless on a hook that looked like it came off a cargo ship, and pointed at a stand of dead trunks sticking out of the green water. He said to throw it in there. I said it looked like a place to lose a lure. He agreed.
The first bass took the worm as it sank beside a trunk, and the take was not a tap, it was a weight that started moving away. I set the hook the way they teach you at home and Chuy said set it harder, so I did, and the fish came out of the water sideways with the worm hanging out of a mouth you could put a fist in. Six pounds on the scale, a fish I would have framed at home. Chuy looked at it and said, little one, and put it back.
By nine the sun had the surface like a mirror and the bite slowed, so we moved out to a point where the old river channel bent and dragged the worms deeper. That is where the big one ate. It did not jump. It went down into the timber and stayed there while I held the rod over my head and said things I will not write down. Chuy backed the boat over it and we lifted it straight up like something out of a well. Nine pounds and change, broad as a shovel, with a tail that slapped water across both of us when it left.
We ate lunch at the lodge under a palapa with a cold beer and a plate of fish the cook would not identify, and were back on the water at four. I lost count after thirty bass, which is a sentence I have never written anywhere else. On the last cast of the evening a fish bigger than any of them followed the worm to the boat, looked at me, and went back to its tree. Chuy said she would be there in the morning. I said so would I. He said everyone says that.
Early starts and long runs, with her stitched into the crown. See our embroidered boat hats, drawn from a photo of your own boat.