| Should
you ever get the idea that any fishing spot in the world is worth
towing your boat over 40-plus miles of brutal washboard in 100-degree
heat to get there, think twice. Actually, think at least three or four
times. I wish I had done a little more thinking myself before striking out across the desert a couple of weeks ago for Bahía de Tortugas, way out near the tip of the Vizcaíno Peninsula midway down Baja's Pacific coast. Of course, if there's anywhere in North America that is worth such an unpleasant approach, it's Tortugas. My main problem was Hurricane Henriette, which I knew wouldn't hit us there, but which I wanted to beat back to the main highway. That meant we only had one short day of fishing. The four fishing days I'd initially planned would likely have been more than worth the approach. The Misery Begins The pavement ends a little less than 40 miles west of the town of Vizcaíno on Mexican Highway 1, and the misery begins. In case you've ever wondered, the average boat trailer is not designed nor built for off-highway use. Neither is the average trailer tire. The first things to go were the side-guides. After a few previous run-ins with shorter stretches of washboard, I'd managed to secure the bottoms of the vertical supports to the trailer frame reasonably well. But now the carriage bolts and nuts holding the bunk boards to the supports started to fail — or, more accurately, the bunk boards themselves started to fail. One by one, the heads of the carriage bolts actually wore their way right through the boards. The vibration was so bad that the bolts enlarged the holes in the wood until the wood slid right over the bolt heads. I stopped three times to add washers and retighten the bolts. The fourth time, I discovered that the wood of the port side guide had simply split apart entirely. I didn't have the tools to reinforce it, so I took it off completely. It wouldn't fit in the back of the truck, and I was sure it would beat a hole in the deck of the boat, so I wired it to the trailer frame with baling wire for the remainder of the drive. Pretty soon, the starboard bunk board broke too, and I did the same thing with it. When we finally hit town, I had what little was left of the side guides cut off the trailer with a torch and gave the guy who did it what was left of the bunk boards as payment. A couple of trailer tires let go too, and I limped into Tortugas on my two spares. Fortunately, I was watching the tires closely and got to them quickly enough that I was able to get them repaired in Tortugas. Another went completely flat on the return trip, and a fourth was leaking badly by the time I got back to Vizcaíno. The truck frequently edged toward overheating. Grinding along with a heavy load for hours on end at less than 10 mph in 100-degree heat will do that — even to my trusty old Cummins, which rarely breaks a sweat. I never had to actually stop, but there were plenty of long grades where air conditioning wasn't an option. The boat fared remarkably well. The only thing that broke was the metal bracket holding the stereo. Cedros by Private Skiff The next morning, we found an excellent cement ramp — more than suitable for anything you could tow out there — at the El Rincón fish camp at the extreme southwestern corner of the bay. Outside the bay, the Pacific was lake-calm, and I put the throttle down and headed northwest toward Punta Eugenia at 30 knots. Less than an hour and a half later, we were fishing alongside the Qualifier 105 off Morro Redondo at Isla Cedros. We just had time to farm a couple of yellowtail before heading back for the ramp to pull the boat and get back on the road ahead of the storm. Again, it was a lot of misery for not much fishing, but without Henriette, it would have been a great trip. I won't soon forget winging it across the channel toward Cedros in my own little skiff, and with even a couple more hours — let alone a couple more days — we would have had limits of those big central Baja 'tails. Another Learning Experience If nothing else, it was yet another learning experience in a long series of them I've had while researching my book on Baja trailer boating. Most importantly, I learned that there is indeed an all-weather, all-tides ramp at Bahía de Tortugas, which offers good access to killer late-summer fishing in some of the same places you'd fish on a fall 7- to 10-day long-range trip. I also figured out that two good spare tires is the bare minimum for trailer-boat trips to the remote Vizcaíno coast. Three is better. And it's important to watch them constantly to avoid destroying one by running it flat. Even with two or three spares, there's a good chance you'll have to use a repaired tire. Truck tires can be aired down substantially, which does a lot to make the washboard more comfortable. I run 25 psi in the front and 35 in the rear on long stretches of washboard and haven't had any trouble with sidewall damage. Trailer tires, on the other hand, shouldn't be aired down. You definitely don't want to make those sidewalls any more vulnerable than they already are. The final "lesson" was that even though it might not seem like it, you will eventually get there. There were times in the middle of the unpaved stretch to and from Tortugas when it felt like I might spend the rest of my natural life on that miserable SOB, but in reality I was able to average about 15 mph overall. |