THE UNFORGETTABLE
SEA OF CORTEZ
Baja California's Golden Age 1947-1977
The Life And Writings Of Ray Cannon
By Gene Kira

* History of Baja California sport fishing
* A keepsake, presentation quality volume
* Text of more than 190,000 words
* More than 400 rare Baja photos
* Printed on 60# Sterling Satin stock
* Lifetime, Kivar hard cover
* Special printed endpapers

Binding: Hard Cover
Size: 8.5 Inches x 11 Inches
Pages: 362
Cover: 4-Color, Film Laminated
Internal Pages: Black & White
Price: $39.95
Publisher: Cortez Publications
ISBN: 0-9632188-2-4

Purchase Information

From Chapter 1 -- The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez

   FOR THE NEWCOMER to Los Cabos and the other tourist centers of Baja California, some of the stories and images in this book may seem to come from another place, or at least from a time quite removed from the present. It might seem logical to assume that the thriving tourist industry of Baja California must have developed over a considerable period, and that many of the curiously quaint photographs and otherworldly fishing stories presented here must be from some epoch of the distant past.
   But that is not so. The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez is about a distinct and very recent period of Baja California history that spanned the years roughly from the end of World War II until the completion of the Transpeninsular Highway in 1973 and the opening of the international airport at San José del Cabo in 1977.
   During that brief one-third of a century, the people of Baja California brought their desert peninsula from a world of ox carts and sailing canoes firmly into the modern age. Almost every element of Baja California's modern infrastructure has been created entirely since the end of World War II. This includes the myriad of luxury hotels and resorts, the sport fishing fleets, the international airports, the harbors and ship terminals, the communication systems, the agricultural developments, some of the towns and cities themselves, and all but a single paved highway-from Tijuana to Ensenada.
   Those accomplishments brought many benefits to the people of Baja California, but at the cost of a gracious and traditional way of life, also rich in many ways, that was inevitably pushed into history by the pace and pressure of contemporary society.
   And, there has been another cost. It may be surprising to the newcomer to learn that most of the "unbelievable fishing stories" contained in this book are actually true. Only a few decades ago, the Sea of Cortez supported a density and richness of life that is almost incomprehensible today.
   The writing career of Ray Cannon, the weekly sport fishing columnist for Western Outdoor News, coincided almost perfectly with this era of tremendous economic, social and environmental change; Ray made his first trip to "Baja" in 1947, and he wrote about the peninsula until his death in 1977. In more than a thousand columns and magazine articles from this period, he left us with two important messages:
   First, there is the story of the beautiful Golden Age of Baja California-a time of miracles and progress, but in a land still unspoiled and still heavy with the romantic perfume of old Mexico. This was a time when the people of Baja California enjoyed the best of both worlds.
   And second, there is the story of how recently rich the Sea of Cortez once was, compared to its present status. In the fantastic descriptions of the chapter, "Good Fishing Everywhere!" and in the strong words of the chapter, "Storm Clouds On The Horizon," Ray documents the depletion of population after population of fish species-from the California sardine, to the totuava, the yellowtail, the yellowfin tuna, the giant bass and groupers, and many others-and he warns us of how fragile the sea really is.
   Ray Cannon-through his charisma, his many articles and his bestselling book, The Sea Of Cortez-did more than any other single person to popularize the early tourist industry of Baja California. But now, as Baja's modernization becomes a fait accompli in the opening years of the 21st century, Ray's second message-of our desperate obligation to conserve the beauty and richness of the natural world-emerges as his most lasting legacy.
   As the people of Baja California begin to take the first steps toward the restoration and preservation of their magnificent Sea of Cortez, they may perhaps be encouraged by the enthusiastic ghost of Ray Cannon and this vivid reminder of a beautiful past, still alive just beneath the surface of things, that happened only yesterday. --Copyright © 1999 by Gene Kira

From Chapter 5 -- San Felipe Discoveries

(The following classic account also appeared in the 1966 The Sea Of Cortez)

   Early Days At San Felipe

   I have a special attachment for the North End, since it was there that I experienced a single, adventure-packed day that changed the whole course of my life. It was a day so filled with excitement and enchantment that it caused me to shed my lifetime career and become a vagabundo del mar-a vagabond of the sea-a way of life that has given me many rewarding and fun-crammed years. It was a rags to riches story in reverse.
   That day was my first on the bountiful and mysterious waters of the Sea of Cortez, and within a few hours I became involved in the most fantastic fishing I had ever experienced.
   The time was 1947, a couple of years before the first road had been graded to this sector of the Cortez. Señor Abelardo Rodríguez, former President of Mexico, and his partner, attorney Guillermo Rosas, co-owners of a large section of San Felipe, engaged me to make a survey of the area's angling potential and to help train native shrimp boat crews so they could assist stateside anglers who were anticipated as soon as the proposed paved road and accommodations were completed. Eddie Abdo, an opera singer and my fishing amigo, persuaded me to let him in on the venture. We drove down from Hollywood to Mexicali in a pickup and took a shortcut to our campsite, two miles above San Felipe. Señor Rosas had a comfortable and well-organized camp and enthusiastic crews ready for our three months of "work."
   Rodríguez and partner Rosas owned a vast stretch of the beach above and below San Felipe as well as most all of the land occupied by the pueblo. They had a fine camp, two small shrimp boats and two outboard skiffs fitted out for us.
   The excitement began the next morning, soon after we rounded guano-plastered, 286-foot-high Isla Consag.
   From a distance the island itself seemed to be quivering, but a closer view revealed only restless activity of immense numbers of birds, sea lions, and other sea creatures.
   I had heard sea lions roar, cough, and trumpet many times in the Pacific, but the hallelujahs the sea lions in this assemblage were blasting out sounded like an old-time revival meeting.
   There were more than three-hundred of the tuba-throated creatures. Great, bewhiskered bulls were busy routing the younger males from their sprawling harems, which filled the tide-washed caves and spread far into the grottoes and benches. In nearby surf a younger, virginal set was performing like a corps of dancers executing a circular ballet routine. Despite the racket, the whole show was one of nature's finest circuses.
   It was spring, a period when creatures on the land and in the sea are stirred by a restless agony to get mixed up in some kind of an adventure, romantic or otherwise. It was a time when that latent primitive urge to return to the wilds becomes compelling among kids and codgers, and all ages in between.
   The full force of spring was bubbling in both of us as we glided over the velvety blue surface of the Cortez at sunrise. The voyage and the Sea were delightfully strange-it felt like we were cruising on out into the beyond. As the first rays of the rising sun beamed over the water, our reverence for that new day was expressed in Abdo's dramatic and devout Arab invocation. The six-foot-four, 250-pound singer stood atop the wheel house of our shrimper, and facing toward Mecca, gave full thunderous volume to the Mohammedan call to prayer: "La illa la" (There is no God but Allah) "Allah azime" (Allah is great).
Except for the young and neat skipper, our crew of five Mexicans looked like cutthroat pirates, but all assembled on the bow and were so awed by Eddie's ritual they repeatedly made the sign of the cross.

Monster From The Deep

   Crew members had hosed the lengthy deck and were working on the opposite corner from our position on the stern, where we had settled for some fishing, when I tied into something that sent vibrations up the rod to my uppers. Whatever I had was as heavy as a log and felt like no other creature I had ever tied into.
   Eddie quit fishing and set his rod aside to see what I had hooked. He was amazed when ten feet down in the water there appeared a great and vicious-looking head with beady eyes and gaping jaws set with glistening teeth. The head was followed by a huge, squirming body that seemed to extend to the depths.
Both of us froze. We were gazing right into the face of a real sea monster. As I cautiously eased it up to the surface, Eddie grabbed the shark gaff, and in one powerful swoop, caught the creature through the throat. The sting caused it to lurch upward, helping Eddie to hoist it aboard. As the slithering monster hit the deck, both hook and gaff came free, and it went skidding straight toward the bare feet of the Mexican crew, teeth snapping like castanets. As one, they gave the fearsome thing one horrified glance, and scurried up the mast pole. And who was the top man on the timber? El Capitán.
   The ten-foot denizen proved to be a conger eel (Muraenesox sp.), the largest recorded to that date. We soon caught two others measuring over eight feet, which led us to the mistaken belief that they were quite common. Instead of saving the rare specimens for our collection, we committed a scientific error by cutting them into steaks and eating all we could of the white, poultry-like meat. (The only other king-sized conger reported to have been caught in the Cortez, to my knowledge, is an eight-footer taken at Mazatlán.)
   Moving out to deeper water, we brought up several other kinds of fish, among them a 100-pound baya grouper, a 60-pound spotted pinta cabrilla, a 125-pound totuava, a large dog snapper, and a 30-pound white seabass. The seabass was the only species in the whole day's catch that was familiar from Pacific Coast fishing. It was easily identified and distinguished from its close relatives, the corvina and totuava, by the raised white cord along its belly.
   Although several of the fishes that we caught around Isla Consag were closely related to some I had taken in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, most of our day's catch was completely new to me. We felt that we had been angling in an untouched Eden. Even the behavior of the birds-pelicans, goonies, terns, gulls, and frigates-and the crazy performances of the sea lions seemed different from elsewhere.
   Then there were the other queer sights, such as the occurrence of thousands of coconut-sized jellyfish, most of them with one to two-inch jacks residing in their tentacles. The jellyfish were so poisonous that a mere touch would have killed other small fishes or given a human a serious sting. On spotting drifting food morsels, the tiny jacks would dash out for them, then scuttle back to resume peeking from under the protective, bowl-shaped blobs. These young jellyfish (floating invertebrate colonies called Portuguese man-of-war) were being moved southward by the current. Scientific reports of six-inch-long jacks seen in residence in large jellyfish at the mouth of the Cortez caused us to speculate on the long and adventuresome voyage the little fish were embarking upon.
   On our way back to port, to climax the day in the fish fantasy land, a big marlin grabbed a bone jig I was trolling and made four magnificent jumps before breaking the hook and taking off.
   It was the return to San Felipe that added the final touch of sheer delight to this fullest of days. Just a mile out from the village, as we were gliding into the setting sun with a breeze at our back, Eddie climbed to the top of the housing and sang a medley of Mexican songs to express and to share his joy of that day.
   Most of the town's populace, awakened from their siestas, came rushing down on the beach to find out whose highly trained voice was booming out their native melodies. At that moment they would have elected Eddie the jefe (mayor) of the pueblo. In fact, from that time on, every service we asked for was happily granted. --By Ray Cannon, With Copyright © Permission From Carla Laemme 1999