The customs officer at the small modern airport in Puerto Vallerta eyed me up and down, his pressed official blue uniform thrown off-kilter by three-day stubble and dirty fingernails. Piecing together his gestures with a couple of words snatched from his rapid-fire Spanish, I gathered he wanted to know the contents of my luggage, which included a densely taped brown shipping box. Reflexively, the top of my lip broke into a sweat, flushing through my entire body until my linen dress was soaked.
And this time I wasn’t even carrying. I mean, who brings smoke into Mexico? If anything, it gets shipped ahead along with the fishing poles. In halting Spanglish, I explained the luggage contained bathing suits and sarongs, a couple dozen back issues of the NYT Sunday Magazine, several different soy sauces, fileting knives, sesame seed oil, Japanese chili powder Shichimi Togarashi, a sharkskin grater (for the undeclared wasabi root), a loaded tackle box, a canister of Jasmine Pearl tea, a jar of honey, a good bottle of Tuscan olive oil, and a case of wine.
Ah, yes, the wine. At the mention of the word, the officer’s bushy black eyebrows shot up towards an awning of poorly trimmed bangs shading an enormous forehead. Yes, indeed, he needed to collect duty tax on the wine. How much was each bottle worth? A few pesos paid on a Visa card and we rolled out of the terminal into a brightly colored wall of blazing heat leaden with thick, unyielding humidity that wilted me like a Mexican dahlia in stale water. The waiting van, its windows lacy with condensation from the blasting air conditioning, provided welcoming shelter. Icy mini-bottles of Mexican beer were fished from the depths of a red plastic cooler resting on the front seat, their petite size ensuring each of the three gulps cold and refreshing; a fine introduction on how to beat the unrelenting heat.
Stopping at a roadside stand, we sipped coconut water from its shell, the hard exterior opened by a grinning, machete-yielding boy, a tree trunk his butcher block. An old woman, deeply lined and sporting a stained red bandana around her neck nodded in my direction, offering slices of warm mango, its resinous-sweet nectar ripe, juicy, sexual.
We selected papayas and watermelons and loaded burlap sacks with local sea salt, both fine and coarse. Bags and bags were filled with tiny limes the size of golf balls, their distinctive green juice to flavor our morning tea, afternoon margarita and evening ceviche.
The small coastal surfing town of Sayulita is dressed in the colors of the sun; dayglow pink stairwells lined with cacti and succulents; thickly stuccoed walls painted orange and yellow; a quiet corner blooming with magenta bougainvillea and elaborate birds of paradise, their plumage rivaling an Isabella Blow chapeau. Sayulita’s dense air is punctuated with aromas of jasmine flowers and the brine of the omnipresent Pacific Ocean, as well as an unctuous, fetid decay; the humid heat rotting food into garbage with surprising rapidity.
Bringing pyrotechnics
rivaling those of a Kiss concert, a spectacular thunderstorm blew in from the
north in the early evening, pulling the plug on the town’s electricity. Lightning strikes lit up the ocean as if
midday, confusing the sea creatures below, while rolling thunder bounced off
the mountains, its claps even silencing the chatty Chachalaca birds residing
in the nearby jungle, their never-ending banter oddly reminiscent of my
mother-in-law.
Over the blaze of candlelight and sips of Don Julio tequila, we optimistically rigged our fishing poles with heavy nylon monofilament line, hoping to score a good fight with a dorado (mahi-mahi), red snapper, roosterfish, or bonita, all of which roam these waters. We debated lures while attaching iron weights and hand-forged, Japanese carbon steel hooks to our lines. As we tied knots, I wondered how different our evening preparations were from those of the local fishermen one hundred years ago. At the turn of the century, fishing line was made from silk, linen and cotton and had to be carefully unspooled after returning home from a day’s work to be washed and laid out to dry thoroughly in order to prevent rot. But then again, maybe our evenings were not that different: I’d bet many of them threaded their fishing poles by candlelight in between sips of the local hootch while arguing about the best methods to hook fish.
Strong coffee in hand, we set out before sunrise. Captain Enrique, a native who’s fished the Pacific from Central America to Alaska, tied up his comfortable fishing boat to a panga floating quietly on flat waters just outside the harbor as first light dawned. Barely bigger than a Boston Whaler and a whole lot less posh, the panga is an open, modest-sized, outboard-powered fishing boat common throughout much of the developing world, without a cover to shield its passenger from the unabated sun and pounding heat. The man aboard the panga had been jigging all night to catch the small baitfish Enrique now bought. As we motored away, he explained it’s very common for one or two men to navigate a panga one hundred miles or more into the open ocean to hook tuna and sailfish with nothing more than a line and a club, tossing the large, capricious fighters into a huge ice chest on the floor of their small boat.
Noiseless pods of porpoise and dolphin greeted our morning, their skin the color of wet slate and as slick as a Brylcreemed salesman. Hundreds of schools of small fish literally jumped out of the water to be feasted on by sea birds, who picked them out one by one, and pelicans who gobbled up as many as their cavernous maws could manage. We slowly trolled the waters, lines kept long to bob along the surface, while making our way to deeper seas. We fished reefs and rocky outcroppings, dropping weighted lines into bottomless clear waters.
Our haul was insignificant,
yet generous enough to provide dinner.
We fileted three, smallish yellow jack and two very handsome
triggerfish, their skin as tough as rubber and stubbornly resistant to the
newly sharpened knives. Fish bones were
put into a stockpot and covered with water and wine, creating the rich base for
a fiery fish stew. The filets were roughly chopped and tossed with finely minced red serrano and orange habañero peppers, sweet white and spicy red onion, a mound of
fragrant cilantro, sea salt, and the juice from a dozen limes. We fried fresh corn tortillas made in town earlier
in the day by a young woman with a nose ring and Tibetan tats. Sunburned and salt crusted and still slightly
rocking from being out at sea, we sat silently in the twilight, listening to
distant thunder, and scooping up mouthfuls of spicy ceviche with the crispy
chips, cooling our burning lips and tongues with cold Pacifico beers and
margaritas on the rocks served in glasses a Mexican Marie Antoinette would
appreciate.
#mexico #sayulita #fishing #fish #ceviche