The Adventure of a Lifetime
My first adventure to the Mexican Sierra Madre mountains and Lake Comedero started with the biggest largemouth bass of my life and ended with a bigger one!!! A better script would have been hard to write on purpose. It will be challenging for this writer to put into words what a fantastic trip this remote bass fishing adventure is, but with the help of some pictures I will try.
To travel to a truly remote area unlike anything most of us have been exposed to, you need to put your trip success and trust into the hands of a most experienced outfitter. We chose Ron Speed Jr with Ron Speed Jr’s Adventures and never looked back. Here’s one of my favorite results – a grande, ocho doce (Mexican for big ‘un – 8 pounds 12 ounces!!):
The entire trip was an adventure, exciting from start to finish. Lots of planning happened before we ever left our US homes, but Ron Speed Jr’s decades of experience made it much easier to get our ducks in a row, and get everyone to the camp – the NBAA group – Jim Sprague, Jack Horning, Paul Cowen, Scott Tyrell and myself, and then the D & R Sports Center group with Randy VanDam, Don Stevens and 6 other anglers whose names I’ll get all down in a later article.
Quite a bit goes into a trip like this and I’ll get into that later too. For now, lets talk about the fishing, and see some pictures. That’s what we all want to see, right?!?
The fishing was fantastic. Beautiful lake unlike any most of us will fish, surrounded by the Sierra Madre mountains. Tons of rocks. Thick forests of abrasive thorn trees with steep, deep drops into great depths.
We hit Lake Comedero during the January wave post spawn and still could go to spots that were loaded with small to very nice bass. Often, the best spots where on sheer bluff banks where a medium cast to the wall put you in 40 feet of water. The first afternoon, shortly after an excellent shore lunch, I hooked another bass on a Kicker Fish Shad Stick off the top of a thorn tree out from a hot bluff Jim Sprague and I had been spanking good bass off of. For some reason, I had only remembered 1 big bag of Xtreme Bass Tackle 5″ melon tinsel X-worms and at the rate Jim and I were catching bass, it wasn’t going to last the week, so I kept switching off. I brought a lot of big topwater and other specialty lures – more on them later.
The thing about these bass is many of them fought hard, and found the thorn trees quickly. The Grande bass would surprise us often, we found as the week progressed, by feeling like one of the ‘regular’ bass for the first part of the fight before breaking the surface which is when the excitement really amped up!! Exactly how that first big one I caught went. Starting out like any other bass, I did not shout the later familiar warning, “GRANDE!!” until the monster busted out of the water in a gill-rattling, head-bigger-than-a-5-pounder explosion!!
I thought it was a 12-pounder!! They don’t grow like that up here in Michigan often. After 5 awesome, heartbreaking jumps with my own heart beating worse than the first time I saw a deer on opening day, guide Jose netted the big girl while Jim kept shooting pictures. Out came the scales and Jose exclaimed, “Ocho – ocho!!” Spanish for 8 – 8.
My biggest largemouth bass to date. Though I was sure it was a 10, I was ecstatic for the next few hours. It took me an hour just to get my heartbeat back down below 100! Only 15 minutes later, I had another Grande roll up below the same shad stick, causing my heart to actually stop for a moment! It was just too much to hope to get to hogs already on the first day. I had started my morning with a surface shattering bite on a saltwater Chug Bug. A great first day. I had about 1/2 a dozen Shad Sticks and about 12 X Worms left after only the end of the first day! I had a pretty good sized big rod hook-setting stomach bruise already too (sorry about showing you with no warning Don)
Here’s our day 1 guide Jose with Jim Sprague holding one of the many nice bass we caught that afternoon off of bluff banks:
All the guides I fished with were excellent. They’d take your fish off the hook if you wanted. Retie for you. Run the trolling motor. Net your Grande’s Whatever you wanted. They all seemed to know where to take us for topwater action, numbers, better size, big ‘uns. You name it.
After fishing day two again with Jose and Jim, I spent day three with Jack Horning and Luis. Luis really put us on to decent topwater action and later in the day, numbers of quality bass. Here’s Jack Horning with Luis showing off one of the many really nice bass that he landed out of steep cuts and off of bluff banks:
More coming…
(Photos by Dan Kimmel, Jim Sprague & Paul Cowen)
