After my young girlfriend left to go back to school to tell her sorority sisters about her wild spring break in Cabo I just sat at the bar sipping on a beer and I started to talk to all the geriatric Canadians at the bar. The topic was how to keep bucks on your farm during hunting season. Most of these guys fed the deer living on their farms to fatten them up for hunting season but the bucks would sit around all season eating and growing but then they would leave the farm to go look for does during hunting season. The solution they all came up with was to make sure you had lot of healthy does on your farm because they stay put and the bucks come to them. Very interesting but I didn't give a hoot about any of it. The boys bought me a few beers and thanked me for bringing my daughter to the hotel. They all loved her they said. Yea right. I don't think that was love. Lust maybe but not love. I told them about meeting her on the flight and they already knew we partied together for three days in the hotel because there was not much to talk about or do with all the rain outside so they just sat around and gossiped like school girls. I got to know a few of the boys and we had a good time.
I went fishing with a couple of the guys. We caught some small tuna and some sierras which tasted great after the hotel cooked them up for us. We went out one day for billfish and I caught a sailfish. That was my first billfish ever and I found it exciting. I should have taken a pic but I didn't. I hung out at the pool when it was cleaned up after the storm ended. The hotel was all old men so I took off and walked down the beach to find some better scenery most days. I met a few girls and hooked up with a couple of them. I was actually enjoying myself.
Over the next few weeks I did side trips around Baja. I checked out La Paz and all around the Cabo area. There were lots of nice places. Just north of La Paz I found a nice place to hang out on the beach and fish at the same time. I almost moved there but it was actually too hot for me so I went back down south again.
I had arrived in a severely depressed state of mind but after a couple of weeks I was feeling much better. A few rolls in the sack and some sun can do wonders for depression. I tried to do as much as I could do. The walking on the beach seemed to be improving my health tremendously. I could only walk about fifty yards when I arrived and after a couple of weeks I was already able to walk a half mile or more. I figured out that the walking and warm sun were helping me so I concentrated on it like it was physical therapy. My mood started to get better. My thoughts of suicide started to recede somewhat. I started to look forward to tomorrows instead of dreading them. I was very surprised that I was getting better after so many years of constant high pain eating away at my brain. Maybe there was some hope after all.
I started to talk to a Mexican woman that worked at the hotel. She was giving me Spanish lessons at the bar. I offered to pay her to tutor me in Spanish and she declined the offer but then invited me back to her place for dinner and some Spanish practice. She was older than the girls on the beach at about 35 but she was still good looking and fun to be around.
We went back to her place and she made us some good food. Her brother showed up at her place for some dinner too and she fed him and they talked for a few before he left again. Her two boys were at school but they came home in time for dinner too. They ate and took off to play by the beach. We sat around watching the people on the beach where she lived and practiced Spanish. We were drinking beers the whole time and we got a bit hammered. I told her it was time to head back to my hotel but she wanted me to stay so I did. The boys went to bed and her and I did also shortly afterward. I learned how to say things in Spanish like, take off your clothes, slowly, faster, harder, roll over now, I like that, don't stop, and more useful phrases. It was a very good Spanish lesson. I ended up taking almost daily lessons with her. We had a lot of fun together. She was very poor but she would not allow me to help her out with buying food or anything. She wasn't a puta is what she always told me. I discovered that I could buy food and bring it to her as long as I cooked the food. She was ok with that.
I ended up staying in Baja for a few months. It was fantastic for my health both physically and mentally. I was actually feeling good for the first time in years. I still had high pain every day especially at night but I was mobile for the first time in years and that makes a big difference in quality of life. I ended up not taking my life. It kind of caught me off guard how much better I felt. I was emailing and talking with my girlfriend in California regularly. It was now summer up there again so I decided to return to Berkeley and spend the summer while I planned a longer trip to Mexico. I bought a ticket home and took off. Nobody was more surprised than my girlfriend was when I returned from Mexico. She was the only one who knew why I went down there in the first place. She was happy to see that my health had improved so much.
Once back in the Bay Area I tried to keep doing what had worked so well for me in Mexico to improve my health. I kept active and got lots of warm sunshine. I started to go fishing again. I bought a small boat so that I could get out more often and also so that I would have a place to live since I was basically homeless now other than staying at my girlfriend's place. I enjoyed the fishing and started to fish seriously. By seriously I just mean more often than usual. I gave away most of the fish I caught to neighbors, friends, family and to the senior center. The senior center loved it when I brought them fresh fish.
I booked a 26 day fishing trip in Mexico with some friends I met fishing in the Bay Area. I flew down to San Diego to spend a night before we left. I had never done anything like a long range fishing trip before so this was a new thing for me.
The 26 days flew by. I caught my limit of fish and my first big yellowfin tunas also. The best part for me was catching wahoo. Wahoo are like torpedoes that swim around just below the surface at extremely high speeds and they attack baitfish with viscous fast hits and then they take off like bats out of hell. They swim so fast when you hook one that they make a roostertail of water rise up where the fishing line cuts through the water. They can also be a hundred pounds. They are a blast to try to catch. On my best day I caught fourteen of them with the smallest one going at 65 pounds and the largest around ninety pounds. I was one tired fisherman at the end of that day. I gained twenty five pounds on this twenty six day trip because the food was superb and plentiful. When we got back to San Diego, I gave away most of the fish to Salvation army. I had about a ton of fish to give away. I only kept one small tuna, one wahoo and one California sheepshead just because it was such a weird looking fish.
When I got back to San Francisco winter was rapidly approaching and I had to book a trip south to Mexico again. I looked around for good deals and booked a flight to Mexico.
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