Largemouth Bass
The ker-burble sound of a balsa-wood popper chugged deeply and slowly on a glassy lake can be hypnotic. In the morning calm you imagine a 5- to 10-pound largemouth under the fly—examining it hungrily. You await what may inevitably follow: a large hole in the water and a loud ker-sploosh, then a leaping yellow-sided fish the size of a shovel. There are so few places where you can find largemouth bass in large numbers and sizes that special waters like the Sacramento Delta and Mexico’s Mateos and El Salto lakes have become holy waters to bass fishers.
The Mexican lakes have been famous for two decades among conventional bass anglers, but so far they have seen few fly fishers. The numbers of bass taken per day on spin and level-wind gear tell a story: They range from 40 to 90 fish weighing from 2 to 10 pounds or larger. But little information was available on the lake fly catches until the waters were explored by Keith Kaneko of Angling on the Fly, who has fished them repeatedly over the past three years with other expert fly anglers. I fished both lakes with Keith on an exploratory trip in January 2008.
Lakes El Salto and Mateos (650 miles south of Nogales, Texas) are man-made earth-dam lakes built in 1983 and 1967, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Sinaloa Province, near Mazatlán and Culiacán on the west coast of Mexico. Both were built for irrigation of the rich province lowlands and both held a native largemouth bass species to which the Florida strain of largemouth were added (Mateos in 1975 and El Salto in 1985) to feed on a rich forage base of tilapia and shad. Both lakes are gillnetted commercially for tilapia, but this controlled fishery does not seem to affect the largemouth that compete with and feed on the tilapia. Cropping the overproductive, and predacious, tilapia may actually improve the bass fishery.
Mateos
The lake (full name: Presa Adolfo López Mateos) 55 minutes by car from Culiacán has a full pool 50 miles long and 3 to 4 miles wide (55,000 acres), with an estimated 100 miles or more of shoreline and fertile bass and shorebird habitat, including clear water, drowned trees, hyacinth-choked coves, islands, shallows, submerged brush, rocky and gravelly shorelines and headlands, bluffs, islands, and flooded canyons.
In early January when the purple, yellow, and white Amapa trees flower along the rugged surrounding mountains, the lake has an aura of Taoist enchantment, especially in early morning and evening when the sunlight is soft and angular, the lake is quiet, bobcats prowl the shorelines, great blue herons stalk silently, and white pelican flocks sail overhead like animated clouds.
[Sinaloa province, with 13 rivers and 15 lakes, is called the “water capital” of dry Mexico. Lake Mateos is fed by the Tamazula and Humaya rivers. The Editor.]
Mateos is a reborn largemouth fishery. In the ’80s and ’90s its fishery, once known for fish over 10 pounds, crashed due to severe droughts and excessive drawdown for irrigation. But during the past three years, monsoonlike rains have refilled the lake and revived the fishery and Mateos is rapidly recovering its large-fish reputation.
Recent recorded catches of 8- to 10-pound bass confirm this. The lake largemouth record weighed over 16 pounds. In years past, a gear angler took 27 bass of 10 pounds or more in six days of fishing in May. Two were over 15 pounds.
Mateos is again a largemouth-producing factory, where large schools of shad and tilapia are attacked by bass and bait-feeding waterfowl. At bass spawning time (February and March) the large tilapia surround the bass spawning nests and dash in repeatedly to devour the eggs. This is the predator/prey relationship that contributes to the Mateos fisheries balance. The gillnetting may actually help to control tilapia predation on the bass.
Ironically, both Mateos and El Salto lakes have floating gillnets in virtually every cove—so many of them that first-time bass fishers wonder how the bass can survive. They obviously do and in surprising numbers, sizes, and fighting energy. Expectations on a normal day of fishing (fishing daylight to 11:30 A.M., lunch/siesta, then fishing again 1 to 5 P.M.) include: 40 to 75 largemouth hooked on conventional gear and 10 to 30 on fly.
El Salto
El Salto, located 75 miles northeast of Mazatlán at the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains, is famous for its high numbers of largemouth, and especially large fish. [During the past two years over half the visiting El Salto conventional anglers averaged at least one 10-pound-plus fish on a three-day stay. The record El Salto largemouth weighed 18 pounds, 5 ounces. The best five-fish single-day catch weighed a combined total of 53 pounds, 5 ounces. The Editor.]
El Salto (20 miles long, 24,000 acres, and more than 45 miles of shoreline) has a gentler surrounding profile than Mateos, but its lake structure and turbid, food-rich waters create perhaps the richest largemouth habitat in the world: Abundant drowned forests, steep butte faces, islands, canyons, and bays hold so many fishing locations that anglers can explore and fish for days and not intrude on another boat.
Experienced anglers (fly and gear fishers share the waters) do extremely well on both Mateos and El Salto lakes. Beginners and intermediates can expect lower catch rates because largemouth occupy the submerged structure as well as shorelines. Because bass are ambush predators, casting accuracy is demanding for both gear and fly fishers, confirming the old saying: “The difference between a great bass fisher and a good one is two inches (in casting accuracy).”
Gear fishers outcatch fly fishers on these lakes because when the bass are off the bite in the shallows, they continue feeding in the deeper structure, especially along submerged headlands where deepwater lures are fished (walked) upward along the structure. Because fly fishers prefer poppers and other floating flies, and the explosive visual takes they bring, they work the shallows almost exclusively. Fishing flies vertically in the water column or on long, super-fast-sinking heads has not been explored on the lakes, probably because the popping-bug fishing is so exceptional. [Fly fishers are required to take fly gear exclusively. The Editor.]
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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