Swimming in Marlin : Magdalena Bay Region Off Baja California Offers Abundance of Action for Anglers, Backstrokers Alike

It was a wonderful sight: a large marlin swimming freely in a brilliant blue sea, electric shades of purple flowing the length of its body as it approached the small fish, snatching it in its jaws and swimming off.

Jim Kingsmill, treading water nearby and gazing through a mask some 20 miles off the Baja California peninsula, had never seen anything like it. He was entranced.

For a moment, anyway.

The marlin, stung by a hook planted in the small fish, was no longer a free-swimming billfish. A strange force--Kingsmill’s friend fishing from a nearby skiff--was trying to pull it from its world.

The marlin turned and charged in the direction of the object on the surface that had suddenly become the enemy.

Kingsmill, who had jumped overboard because he wanted to witness a marlin strike up close, found himself between the fish and the boat, seemingly about to be skewered.

“I just froze,” he said the other day from his home in San Clemente. “The thing is charging and charging. . . . I didn’t know what to do, so I put my arm up right in front of my mask to kind of block it or shield my face.

“And the fish, just all of the sudden, instead of coming straight at me, went straight up over my head . . . and its tail whapped against my arm.”

Unscathed but a bit unnerved, Kingsmill climbed back aboard the skiff, where Dave Herrera stood with his rod bent to the sea.

Fifteen minutes passed before Kingsmill got another brainstorm.

He wanted to ride the marlin.

“I jumped back in and swam up alongside it,” he said, “and I slid up on its back, kind of riding it really slow. Then I just reached down--he had the hook wedged right in the corner of its mouth--and I popped the hook out. Then I kind of got off to the side of him, swam with him for a second or two, and he just kind of slowly swam away.”

Kingsmill, who had already caught and released more marlin in two days than most anglers catch in a lifetime, spent the rest of the day swimming in water so clear he could see more than 100 feet. And everywhere he looked marlin materialized out of the blue haze.

“They’d come from above and below,” he said. “You’d look to the right, and here’s the marlin maybe 10 feet away, and you could see its whole eye checking you out, fin to mask.”

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So productive was Kingsmill’s recent trip to the Magdalena Bay region off Baja California that he was reluctant to talk about it.

“You don’t even have to print it if you don’t want to, and I don’t care,” he said. “Because if you do, people will think I’m one of those guys saying I’m seeing UFOs and stuff.”

Turns out Kingsmill’s story, unbelievable as it may seem to marlin fishermen who often spend long and fruitless days before discovering a single marlin, is very believable.

“I’ve been doing that type of trip 10 years now, and that’s pretty typical,” Steve Lasley, skipper of the yacht Mirage, said of the number of marlin Kingsmill encountered.

That type of trip is the late fall, early winter trek to “Mag Bay,” about 150 miles north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific side of the peninsula.

Because of a variety of factors, notably the seasonal merging of the tropical Davison Current and the southward California Current, which produces nutrient-rich water for an abundance of baitfish, striped marlin migrating from the south and west congregate outside the bay each fall and winter in such numbers it boggles the mind.

“It’s the truth, you know,” Lasley said. “We probably fished 20 full days and five half days [this season] . . . and we released 255 marlin. Our best day was 63. One guy wanted to see how many he could catch in one day--he had 23.

“I had guys who had been fishing their whole lives, and after going down there they say they’re ruined. They can’t go fishing anymore, because they’ve had it as good as it can possibly get.”

Not many are aware of this seasonal phenomenon because the area is so remote and has no commercial sportfishing fleet. It is fished regularly only by locals and a dozen or two Southland yacht owners who discovered the fishery en route to Cabo San Lucas. And most of them would rather the place remain a secret.

Kingsmill and Herrera have no yacht, so they towed a 20-foot skiff 24 hours down Highway 1. And from the small town of San Carlos they ventured through and beyond the bay.

“We didn’t even get to where it was supposed to be good yet,” Kingsmill said. “And we just started hooking marlin . . . double [hookups], triples. We couldn’t even see them; they’d just come up on the jigs.

“Then the Mirage, which was about five miles east of us, was saying he was seeing tailers, feeders and birds . . . fish everywhere. So we went down to him. We actually had to pull the lures out of the water to get to him, because we kept getting marlin stops on the way.

“On our second day we caught and released 23 fish. I caught one on a fly rod and we had two fish on eight-pound-test line.”

And when he grew weary of catching marlin, he decided to go swimming with them.

“When I first jumped in, it was incredible,” he said. “There were so many marlin that it was like small pods of porpoise everywhere. You know, they just didn’t stop feeding. There’s like a pod of 15-20 fish, but you’d only see two or three feeding, and the rest would be down below. They’d just take turns all day long, feeding on the bait balls [baitfish forced into a tight ball, commonly referred to as meatballs].

The marlin have recently begun to the leave the Magdalena Bay area, some to the west and some to the south, where they are dancing at the ends of the lines of Cabo San Lucas fishermen.

But Kingsmill has already made plans to make another trip to Magdalena Bay next fall, this time with an underwater video camera as a means of proof.

“It was awesome, just an incredible experience,” he said. “I know of a lot of people who have gone down there who have swum with the fish that they’re hooked up to. It’s real tired and they’re swimming with it.

“But I’d never heard of anyone swimming with feeding marlin, completely free. The swimming was more memorable than the fishing, especially because of the one that came at me. It freaked me out.”

WHALE-WATCH SEASON OFF TO KILLER START

Gray whales on their annual migration south to Baja lagoons have been popping up all over, but in the last few days they’ve probably been trying to keep a low profile because of an unusually large showing of killer whales off the Palos Verdes peninsula and the Orange County coast.

Several vessels reported sighting the sleek, black and white mammals, which feed on everything from small fish to large whales.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, director of the American Cetacean Society’s gray whale census project, said the closest sighting was Sunday morning half a mile off Newport Pier.

Later in the day, five miles off Aliso Pier near Dana Point, passengers aboard the Sea Horse out of Dana Point watched as 50-100 killer whales fed and swam as they traveled south.

“Several came within five feet of the boat,” Schulman-Janiger said. “People got several good looks at them.”

The whales were reportedly traveling swiftly, and there were no reported sightings Monday or Tuesday.

Schulman-Janiger is trying to obtain photographs of the whales to try to determine where they came from and if they might belong to the same group that spent three weeks off the Southland coast last winter. She can be reached at (310) 519-8963.

SPORTFISHING INDUSTRY MOURNS LOSS OF SKIPPER

Services were held at sea last Friday for Steve Giffin, owner-operator of the Holiday out of San Diego.

Giffin, a respected and hard-working skipper who had been in the business since the early 1950s, died Dec. 22 of an apparent heart attack after his morning workout at a YMCA pool. He was 63.

THE GREAT OUTDOORS? IT’S ALL INDOORS

The Great Western Outdoor and Recreation Show begins a five-day run today at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Hours are noon to 9 p.m. through Thursday, noon-10 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday. Cost is $7.50 for adults, $5 for seniors (Wednesday through Friday only) and $8 for children 8-14. Children under 14 will be admitted free.