The Lake

You drive out of Mazatlan on the coast road, past the ragged colorful storefronts, the factories and lean-to taquerias, past the fields of agave and tomatoes and lemons, past the town of La Cruz with the door of the big church on main street open to the afternoon heat and a full congregation, past the little house boxes for the dead on the side of the road. Where you end up is a tiny strip of dwellings called La Papalota in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, a short cast from El Salto Lake, arguably the best bass lake in the world. 

Surrounded by rough cattle country and hemmed in by low mountain ranges, El Salto lake is a deep, clear 26,000-acre reservoir that drowned a valley and its farming community in the mid-80’s. In the spring when the lake is typically well below full draw, the ghosts of its past still poke out of the waters: hopeful anglers fish among the bone-white limbs of partly submerged trees or cast their lures alongside the tops of gravestones, cattle corrals, and chimneys. 

As dramatic as the setting is, what really makes El Salto a destination for anglers worldwide is its remarkable ability to produce numbers of specimen-sized bass. Many of the clients of the half-dozen or so lodges scattered around the lake catch 40 to 50 fish a day, with many in the 5- to 7-pound range. And hiding in those underwater thickets of trees and bushes and outbuildings are many, many tilapia-munching bruisers of over 10 pounds.

Billy Chapman, Sr. certainly saw the potential early on. A pioneering American outfitter, he was traveling in Sinaloa on the lookout for potential bass lakes that might support a fishing lodge and guiding business. When he learned the government planned to dam the Elota River and create a huge reservoir stocked with tilapia – to provide locals displaced by the flooding with a commercial fishery – he saw a chance to create an outstanding bass fishery from scratch.

His achievement was to persuade Mexican fisheries authorities to import and stock Florida-strain largemouth from the mother country. “Floridas” are what you need to turbo-charge a bass fishery and they were soon ripping into El Salto’s massive forage base like Las Vegas gamblers at the all-night steak buffet. 

Take these aggressive, fast-growing bass and set them loose in thousands of acres of prime cover and structure, a lake environment that’s seasonably drawn down and refilled in the rainy season, masses of prey fish and little fishing pressure, and you end up with one hell of a bass fishery.

The Fishing

Nicholas picked us up from Mazatlan airport and drove us an hour and a half to the lake. His English was perfectly deadpan in the way of someone who doesn’t have words to waste – when my wife asked where he learnt to speak such good English, he gave a little shrug of incomprehension and said, “in school.”

The lodge was a neat U-shaped garden courtyard with a bar and dining room at one end, about a 10-minute drive from the lake. Nicholas made us the first of many fresh Margaritas and I stared up longingly at a fiberglass replica of a very large bass, like a green keg with fins. As the sun went down a cattle drive pushed down the road in front of the lodge. A herding dog loped along the road on one side of the group of 20 or 30 cattle and two cowboys riding bareback kept the line on the other. The parade left an orange dust cloud in the fading light. 

First Day

Our first day on El Salto began at 5:30 a.m. with a wake-up call from Raymond, the tireless and resourceful lodge manager. After a good breakfast we were driven to the put-in where the guide and boats were waiting. Christian, our young guide, chugged the outboard through the little bay in front of the put-in and then whipped us through the cool dawn between a series of unfolding bays and arms and steep-sided canyons, following lanes between the copses of submerged trees. The bankside varied from sheer cliffs to muddy pastures to impenetrable bush thickets stretching out into the water and when he cut the engine it was possible to watch the depth finder bounce around 20 or 30 feet in the course of a drift.

We put on buzzbaits and fished toward the bank among a hail of topwater strikes. There were fish everywhere – huge boils and serious baritone flushings, but the lures hadn’t produced by the time the light was strong enough to see a pair of wild mules picking their way along a steep game trail on the bank opposite.

Christian generally kept his thoughts to himself but after 10 or 15 minutes in any one spot he’d state with authority “Vaminos!” and we’d scramble to reel in and get seated before we roared off to the next spot.

We began to catch smaller fish steadily from a variety of watery structure. Christian was a purist who looked down on simply tying on a big crankbait and churning away and much preferred to fish a jig or plastic worm. I was bit rusty on the finer points having spent the last couple of seasons more or less devoted to swimbait fishing, but I began to enjoy again the slowness and sustained concentration these techniques demand. 

The heat was intense. Christian moved us from spot to spot at hat-grabbing speed and we drank down the fake cool breeze. We caught bass from every spot, though not of the quality we hoped for. Back at the lodge for a midday meal (and an escape from the unwavering sun) we were met by Carlos bearing history’s most timely crushed-ice beverage, a salty fresh-made Margarita. The effect of drinking it was like was one of those time lapse sequences that show a desert blooming into life when the rains finally come. After lunch we retired for a couple of hours siesta. During the meal there had been much talk of the magic pulling power of a certain brand of deep-diving crankbait. I was enjoying my worm fishing and hardly gave the crankbait believers a second thought. We were back on the lake at 3:30 p.m. for a repeat of the morning’s action: many nice fish up to three pounds but nothing more substantial. 

Two guests had arrived late that morning and were just able to fish the afternoon. At dinner they reported a magnificent 7lb 10 oz fish to one of the lucky pair …“Oh, well done, that’s super”… [pause a half beat to let the murmurs of congratulation die down] and, with wicked symmetry, a 10lb 7oz giant to the other joker. Both fell to the magic crankbait. 

The Trouble with Guides

The trouble, sometimes, with being guided is that they more or less dictate what bait or lure you’re going to use: they want you to catch so you’ll be happy and the lodge outfitter will be happy and you’ll tip them and return to the lodge to spend more money; and they know what lures have worked in the past on thousands of occasions. A helpful suggestion about lures for bigger fish can end up only a degree north of trying to take bread from the mouths of a poor man’s children. Christian stayed faithful to his worms and lizards and other soft plastics on day two and they continued to produce many decent fish but I found myself increasingly toeing the edge of my lure box into the open, its neat rows of pristine crankbaits lined up like infantrymen. Christian saw them alright but was wholly un-moved. 

At dinner that night more news of big fish to the crankbaits … 50 fish over 5lbs, many climbing towards the magical 10-pound mark … lures so essential that one of the clients immediately began disrobing to jump in and dive down 18 feet to retrieve his from an impossible snag. Knowing his boss probably wouldn’t be too delighted at losing a wealthy American client overboard, his guide slipped over the side and dived down for him. 

Raymond, the lodge manager, had spent years in the US trying to get a foothold on the American dream as a factory worker in LA, but despite very good English and a great work ethic was never able to prosper. He finally gave it up and headed home, but his stars had aligned back in La Papalota and he’d found for himself a new wife and a little house in the village behind the lodge, and a new job anticipating the needs of visiting American bass anglers in their own language. His English was good enough to decode my statement that evening about being really very satisfied with the fishing so far and how much I admired Christian’s single-mindedness. 

The next morning at the boat launch there was an unmistakable flintiness in the rapid-fire instructions he gave to Christian as he prepared the boat for the day’s fishing. Christian put some extra pep and tight turns into our morning commute to show he wasn’t exactly delighted with the situation, but by mid-morning he had delivered us to the crankbait killing grounds. 

I’d been given an orangey crankbait by a sympathetic guest and we immediately began to nail a few smaller fish. Though outwardly stoic, Christian had a nicely honed sense of fishing’s humorous side and, for example, would giggle with delight if you tripped the bail arm accidentally and cast forcefully for the horizon only to have the lure smash into the water one foot away from the boat. 

Throughout the hot days whenever I caught a decent fish I would hold it up admiringly and oversell it to him just a bit:

“Four?”

[Christian, without hesitation:] “Maybe two and a half”

[next fish] “Five, perhaps?”

“Maybe three point five; maybe three.”

[next fish, slightly more insistent] “A three, SIN DISPUTA, no way that’s less than a three”

[Christian, flatly] “Two and a half, maybe one and a half.”

I launched the crankbait between two tree limbs and was just thinking that there wouldn’t be enough depth there for me to grind the crankbait down to the right … WHAM! A beautiful force ripped line from the spool and the rod was arched to the water. It was obvious to everyone this was a different class of fish and Christian immediately started shaking the net loose from the deck. After perhaps two minutes or so of head shakes and deepwater thumps a great green bruiser came up from the depths and was scooped into the net. It looked like it could eat for breakfast my previous biggest bass. I whooped and shouted in triumph but I played it straight for once when I asked him to estimate the weight:

“Seven, Christian?”

He gave me a sober look and then a hairline crack of a smile: “Eight, maybe eight and a half.”