Ovgard

Outside of the Pacific Northwest, where using live bait is generally illegal, most anglers have used a small live fish to catch a bigger fish.

Anglers in southern California ply the blue coastal waters with live sardines and anchovies for kelp and sand bass and the occasional bonito. Denizens of the Deep South soak live sunfish in hopes of catching a big largemouth bass or catfish or gar. Anglers in the Great White North might even soak a live sucker or perch in hopes of landing a pike or musky.

Shark anglers in the Gulf of Mexico favor sturdy drum, grunts and croakers while fishing the surf for toothy superpredators. Across much of the Heartland, a live golden or red or sand shiner can entice anything from big crappie to walleye, but even the smallest minnow you’ll see struggling on the end of a hook will be at least the size of your thumb.

Someone using a larval fish less than half an inch in length would be viewed with some skepticism and considered downright loony if said larval fish was fished on a micro hook equivalent to a Size No. 32 or smaller.

Yet, that’s exactly what I was fishing with while hunched over in the blackness of a sweaty, Mexican night in search of a host of tiny predators that fled the beam of my headlamp as soon as it swept over them.

Precious water

Fishing in Baja Sur is ingrained in the local culture as much as swimming, surfing and soaking up the sun at the beach, but given extremely limited freshwater and even more limited accessible water open to fishing, it took some work.

After visiting with a local police officer who spoke much better English than I spoke Spanish, I was directed to an area where I could legally fish freshwater so long as I released every native fish. I couldn’t find anything to back this up in print, despite hours of searching, but he seemed confident enough. Since I release virtually everything I catch in freshwater, I wasn’t worried.

Still, when I arrived, I made sure to check for signage just in case, and though I found signs banning hunting, horseback riding and bringing vehicles into the water, there were no signs banning fishing, so I felt vindicated.

Given the lack of freshwater fishing opportunities in the region, bait proved tough to come by. There were no worms at the local fishing stores. Though I managed to catch a few of the resident species on shrimp or bread, one of my main targets, the Pacific sleeper, wasn’t having it.

Besides, I was only catching tilapia. Like most of the subtropical and tropical world, tilapia are firmly established in all of Baja Sur’s limited freshwater environments, as are nonnative mollies with mishmashed genetics. I caught both of these survivalist invasives at several locations where the water conditions were either too poor or too inconsistent for natives to persist.

The only local anglers I saw fishing the freshwater had filled a bucket with tilapia; whether they had not not caught any native fishes or had already released them is anyone’s guess.

On a whim, I decided to use a small tilapia as cut bait, and it proved helpful in catching fickle Pacific fat sleepers and river gobies alike. But the third freshwater local, the Pacific sleeper, just wouldn’t bite.

It wasn’t until I saw some tiny tilapia just out of their larval stage that I was struck with an idea: these could be bait, too.

Clearly identifiable even when small, tilapia larvae and fry look nothing like the native gobies or sleepers, having an entirely different body shape, noticeable dark markings on bright silver bodies and a propensity for staying much higher in the water column instead of sitting on the bottom like the three native species.

I tried hooking a micro tilapia, but they proved unwilling (or too small) to eat.

So patiently, I waited until some came close enough to shore before quickly scooping a handful of water onto the bank. Three tiny silver tilapia flopped in the dirt, and I grabbed one gently before impaling it on a hook. The others swam in a small water tank I’d brought just in case I needed more bait.

Live bait

The wriggling death throes of the nonnative fish proved too much for the Pacific sleeper to resist, and it hungrily ripped my tiny live bait off my equally tiny hook. Unfortunately, the sleeper failed to get hooked in the process.

I tried again and again, only to fail. I just could not hook up. They ranged from a few inches long up to nearly three-quarters of a pound, so I tried larger hooks. Nada.

Finally, after several hours hunched at the margin of the warm waters effectively feeding the local sleeper population, I finally caught one. It wasn’t big, but it allowed me to grab a quick photo before I let it go.

Living up to its name, it wriggled into a weedy mass and sat motionless as if asleep for nearly 30 seconds before my light finally sent it packing.

Though the sleeper was a little bigger than my thumb, the baitfish it had eaten could have easily fit onto my thumbnail. The predator-prey cycle I’d capitalized on was not new nor even that unique except that it was done in miniature. I can’t remember another time I used a live bait measured in millimeters.

I went on to fish almost exclusively saltwater for the duration of my trip, but I learned a valuable lesson: never sleep on live baits — no matter how small.