The Rio Panuco is brown, wide, and warm as bathwater by ten in the morning, and it holds a fish that has been doing business more or less unchanged since long before anybody thought to put a hook in it. Alligator gar get talked about as a Texas animal, which is fair, but the river systems down the Mexican coast have always had them too, and the ones in Tamaulipas do not appear to have been told they are supposed to be rare.
You find them by watching. Gar come up to gulp air, because they can, and a big one rolling on a flat brown surface looks exactly like a log that has decided to reposition itself. Our boatman ran a wooden panga up under the overhanging trees and cut the motor and we sat there in the heat for forty minutes doing nothing but looking, which is a lot to ask of anyone before lunch. Then something the length of a canoe paddle turned over about eighty feet out, and the whole boat sat up like a dog hearing a car door.
The problem with a gar is the mouth. It is two long beaks of solid bone with a hard palate behind it, and there is very nearly nowhere in there for a hook point to end up. So you throw a chunk of fresh mullet on heavy tackle, and when the line starts moving off you do the hardest thing in fishing, which is nothing at all. Let it go. Count to a number you have already agreed on and then forget the moment it matters. Somebody in the boat will always start counting out loud, and somebody else will always tell them to stop.
We came tight on the third fish of the day. It went up out of that muddy water and turned itself completely over in the air, all armor plate and teeth and old bad manners, and came down hard enough to soak the man in the bow, who took it personally. Twenty five minutes of that. When we finally got it beside the panga it was a shade over six feet and looked less like something we had caught than something we had disturbed. We took two photographs, got the hook cut, and put it back.
A family fishing with a cast net downstream watched the whole performance without much visible excitement, which was humbling, since they clearly catch them regularly and eat them and do not require twenty five minutes to do it. On the ride back the boatman asked how big the ones in our country get. We told him. He nodded politely and did not say the obvious thing, which we all appreciated.
Whatever the water, the boat looks right on a shirt. See our custom boat shirts and apparel, drawn from a photo of your own boat.