Fighting Dirty : El Bajo, a Seamount in the Sea of Cortez, Lures Tuna That Know How to Win Ugly

Cody Butler sat at the bow of the boat, exhausted.

His legs dangling overboard, his chin and arms resting on the aluminum rail, he watched a man on a nearby panga struggling with a powerful tuna that had him red-faced and flustered.

“Misery,” Butler said with a sigh.

Misery indeed.

The man in the small boat, Bob Mead, 45, from Anaheim, had been playing tug of war with the giant fish for nearly an hour, and the stalemate was nowhere near an end.

Standing at the stern of the Mexican skiff, drenched in sweat under a relentless Baja sun, Mead pumped with all his might, but every time he gained a little line, the fish took it back.

Butler, only 14, was recovering from a similar battle, losing when the monstrous fish shook its head and snapped the line only a few feet from the surface.

Butler sighed then, too, but it was as much a sigh of relief as disappointment. He had been fighting his fish for about 50 minutes, and things had gone anything but smoothly.

The tuna had darted beneath the panga in a last sprint for freedom, tangling Butler’s line with that of Capt. Juan Romero, 35, who was struggling with a tuna of his own on the other side of the boat.

Romero then tried to loosen his drag to let his fish run and possibly untangle the line, but his plan backfired. The fish spun line from his reel so fast it created a massive backlash and Romero’s reel became useless. He tried to hand-line the fish, but didn’t have a chance.

Romero’s line snapped and he fell back. And then Butler’s line broke.

The tuna, each about four feet long and three feet around, packed with about 80 pounds of muscle, circled the boat for several minutes as if taunting the frustrated anglers.

Mead’s fish, an estimated 100-pounder, eventually won its freedom as well, the line breaking when the captain grabbed the fish and tried to pull it closer to the boat and within range of his gaff.

Mead looked at his partner, Russell Guidry, in disbelief.

“He dragged that line right over its teeth,” an irritated Mead said.

But off in the distance, another school of tuna surfaced, leaping and lunging after small bait fish with such ferocity, an acre of ocean was whipped into a froth.

Both boats sped to the scene and the adrenaline again began to flow through the fishermen, who despite their complaining, were eager to relive this chaos on the high seas.

Fast on the scene, Butler, Mead and Guidry, and others nearby, cast more sardines into the heart of activity, and it wasn’t long before they were hooked up again, rocking and reeling at a remote offshore bank called El Bajo, a seamount in the Sea of Cortez about 30 miles from La Paz, east of Espiritu Santo Island.

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El Bajo has long been a popular scuba-diving location and is famous for hammerhead sharks that circle the underwater peaks by the hundreds, for some reason leaving the divers alone.

Marlin, wahoo, whales and a variety of reef fish and smaller sharks can also be seen swimming around the offshore bank.

But in recent months the seamount has become a refuge of sorts for huge schools of giant yellowfin tuna, an elusive species that generally covers a great deal of ocean in its search for food.

Fishermen generally find tuna where they find porpoises, as the mammals are more adept at finding food. A few tuna are caught and then the mammals and fish disappear. And if the tuna do stick around in a given area, they usually fall victim to commercial net fishermen.

But at El Bajo, the fish are targeted only by sport fishermen, who generally fish with line testing 30-60 pounds--the fish tend to stay away from the heavier stuff--and lose as many as, or more than, they catch. The banks are too high--about 55 feet beneath the surface--for commercial fishermen, whose nets would probably be destroyed by the jagged reefs.

“If they put a net down they better say bye-bye, because they are not going to get the net back,” Romero said.

Romero, whose panga Tilly Willy is run cooperatively through Hotel Los Arcos, and Butler’s grandfather, Bob, who manages a fleet from his house next door, said the tuna have been at El Bajo for at least three months.

Bob Butler provided proof that the tuna are what he terms “residents” of El Bajo the other day: a big rusty hook that once belonged to Romero’s homemade gaff.

“The gaff broke off one day when Romero tried to lift one of those big tunas I caught,” Butler said. “A month later, he comes to me and brings me this hook--it was sticking out of the head of the tuna I caught in the same place. Somebody else caught that tuna a month later.”

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El Bajo’s newest residents are mostly in the 50- to 100-pound class, but Romero has seen them up to 150 pounds. The fish are so strong that many of the regulars don’t even fish for them, or if they do, they only want one to fill the freezer.

Yellowfin tuna--unlike the more glamorous game fish such as dorado, sailfish and marlin, which usually put on acrobatic displays during the fight--could be called the blue-collar fighters.

They will take a live sardine in a gulp, then usually head straight down, bending the stoutest of fiberglass rods with apparent ease. A large tuna will stay deep for an hour or more until the pressure becomes too much, then come up little by little, saving its strength to make another run.

Eventually, the fish will rise and change tactics, circling the boat or swimming beneath it, sending the arm-weary angler stumbling up and down the deck. Those who are not hooked up usually reel in and wait, seemingly getting a bigger kick out of watching their shipmates suffer than fighting a fish of their own.

Throughout Mead’s battle with his monster, Guidry wore a sneaky smile. “I was cheering on the tuna,” he acknowledged later.

When the day was over, the two went back to La Paz and told another friend, Steve Richards, that he didn’t know what he was missing. But what they really wanted was to watch their friend get worked over.

They brought him out the next day and Richards got a first-hand taste of tuna toughness. In the middle of the fight a dehydrated Richards cried out, “Beer! Beer!” and one of his smiling companions held the bottle to Richards’ mouth while he guzzled and gasped.

Richards tried sitting on an ice chest to rest, but the tuna promptly dragged him to the bow. Mead and Guidry followed him with the cooler, laughing as Richard agonized, eventually landing a four-footer weighing about 70 pounds.

Richards, rarely at a loss for words, was this time.

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A trip to the tuna grounds begins at dawn on the beach in the bay at La Paz. Customers are picked up and taken to the coast, usually a small bay, where the captain uses a net to catch sardines.

Then a course is set for El Bajo, through the channel separating Baja from picturesque Espiritu Santo Island, around the south end of the island and out into the gulf.

On a recent trip with Romero, he stopped at a small buoy and tossed a few sardines. Neon-green dorado sped through the water and inhaled the tiny bait fish.

Romero trolled a bare hook and promptly hooked one of the dolphinfish, which leaped and shook until finally shaking Romero’s hook.

“I hooked a dorado on a bare hook!” an excited Romero said.

Romero then told Butler, who lives in La Paz and sometimes acts as Romero’s deckhand, to sing “La Cucaracha.”

“Every time we sing ‘La Cucaracha,’ the tuna go crazy,” Romero said.

Butler declined. But Romero began to sing. Surprisingly, after his first chorus the water on the horizon began to churn.

“You see? I told you,” he said, opening his throttle.

Only one panga was on the scene. Mead was standing at the stern, grimacing and holding on as the 100-pound tuna used its powerful tail to stay down and out of sight.

Butler and Romero cast sardines and both hooked up almost immediately. Butler’s back began to ache after about 20 minutes and he asked for help. Romero had his hands full, though, and Butler fought on.

Then their lines tangled and the fish were gone.

Mead was still on his fish, though, the tuna holding its own in the dark depths of a glassy blue sea. Guidry watched, smiling every time the tuna took the line Mead had gained.

Butler watched, too. But he didn’t crack a smile, instead putting himself in Mead’s shoes and shaking his head.

“Misery,” he said.