What’s The Plan Stan?

The basic plan ended up something like this:

1) Pick two or three spots to camp that most reliably produced our target species of Yellowtail, Dorado, Striped Marlin, Grouper and Rooster. The spots started out as Santa Rosalia, Magdalena Bay, and Los Barriles but we ended up dropping Mag Bay by the end of the trip because of security and poor fishing concerns from others that had been there. Here is a map of the final route, end to end (click to enlarge).

2) Pick a time of year for the target species in an area which, based on the fishing calendars in The Book, ended up being May/June or September/October. May 2007 was the soonest that worked, so it won. Now that I think about it, this September might not be a bad idea either…

3) Take as much time off work as possible without getting fired (I actually had a greater concern of leaving the family behind for so long, but don’t tell my boss). We decided that roughly 3 weeks plus a few days on either end would enable us to remain gainfully employed, happily married and still provide enough travel and fishing days to make the trip worthwhile.

Over the next 18 months, I digested volumes of guidebooks, maps, and of course spent so much time on the Internet that I was on the brink of not having a wife to return to. I am an admitted control freak, so a trip with hundreds of unknowns is difficult to stomach without having every little detail explored and written down; From campgrounds to tackle to the exact location of each gas stop (and which were trustworthy to boot), I converted stress into documentation until I had a sufficient library built up. During this time, the BajaNomads and Bloodydecks forums were invaluable in providing detail after detail of all things Baja and Big Game fishing. Simultaneously, Steve and my Dad rapidly built a collection of tackle that any fisherman would be proud of.