For Light-Tackle Fishing in Sea, It’s Hard to Beat Dorado
LORETO, Baja Sur, Mexico _ You can have the marlin and the sailfish, both acrobatic speed merchants. You can take the various tuna and all the amberjacks, deep-water sluggers with incredible endurance. Forget about the lightning-fast king mackerel and their supercharged cousins, the wahoo.
My vote goes to dorado as the finest light-tackle fish in the sea. I’ve had a love affair with dorado since I caught my first one in the Gulf of Mexico about 30 years ago. We called them dolphin (not to be confused with the mammal of the same name). In Hawaii, they’re called mahi-mahi. Their Mexican moniker suits them best. South of the border they’re called dorado, as in El Dorado, the mythical city with the streets of gold.
About 30 miles offshore of Loreto, in the Sea of Cortez, Jim Shulin and I were trolling oversized flies on big saltwater fly rods. Shulin works for the Dallas-based Temple Fork Outfitters, which makes high-quality gear at affordable prices.
The sea was choppy and the fish were scarce, but our guide, Antonio Davis Castro, insisted that we troll. Shulin shares my disdain for trolling, but the choppy water made it difficult to see sporadic clumps of floating sargasso that might be hiding dorado.
We were both staring astern, glassy-eyed when a fish flashed through the boat’s wake about 20 feet behind the stern. It moved so fast I couldn’t tell what it was. Three seconds later, a fish took a shot at my fly, 120 feet behind the boat.
“I think we’re in a school of fish,” I told Shulin.
Before I could finish the thought, the fly was slammed, the reel was screaming and a 14-pound dorado was doing cartwheels as it headed for the Pacific.
Castro, put the engine in neutral and dipped a net filled with live bait from the baitwell. He tossed the baitfish overboard, hoping to attract and hold other members of the school. The dorado, having spooled about 50 yards of line on its initial run, then jumped three feet out of the water.
The fish was an other-worldly color combination of shimmering gold, green and blue. No other fish appeared from the cobalt-blue water, and it finally dawned on me that there was no school. The dorado that I’d hooked was a lone bull that appeared in the boat wake, moved 100 feet in three seconds, hit the fly and missed, then hit the fly again and was hooked.
Despite nearly 10 pounds of drag pressure and the tiring power of a TFO TiCr 9-foot rod, the 14-pounder continued its dogged resistance for about 15 minutes. It must have jumped 10 times.
The fish was a personal best for me but a marginal catch by Loreto standards. Later that morning, we loaned our gaff to an angler who was fighting a truly big dorado on a heavy boat rod. When we pitched the gaff to the angler’s fishing guide, we could see the deep fork of the big fish’s tail break water about 10 yards from the boat and figured the fight was nearly done.
It was 30 minutes before the dorado came to gaff. That fish weighed about 40 pounds and was probably less than 2 years old. Males may grow to 60 pounds in two years. Few live longer than four years. Like the words to a country song, they live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.
That same morning, we watched a dorado chasing a flying fish. It takes a real speed merchant to even contemplate eating flying fish.
Dorado are eating machines that often travel in schools numbering in the thousands. They have an affinity for floating structure, like the dead pilot whale that had showed up the day before. By the time our boat found the whale, there were 14 other boats already there, most of them hooked up.
The first anglers to find the whale figured they boated 25 or 30 fish.
Unfortunately, we visited one of the world’s top dorado destinations during one of the least productive late July seasons that Loreto has experienced in 20 years. Last year, California angler Atwin King and his son fished during the same six-day time frame and caught 258 fish between them, average size 15 to 20 pounds.
TFO founder and president Rick Pope caught a 48-pounder during that blitz. He fought the big fish for 45 minutes.
For beauty, speed, power, jumping ability, widespread availability, and willingness to bite a variety of lures and baits, dorado are the ultimate light-tackle offshore fish. The fact that they’re terrific on the table is a distinct bonus.
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(c) 2007, The Dallas Morning News.
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ARCHIVE PHOTOS on MCT Direct (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): SPORTS DOLPHIN 2 FL (file of dolphin, also known as mahi mahi or dorado)
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